Maccala improvement: Adaptive Curves

Picture to People makes vector based drawing using Maccala API. It's very powerful and robust, so P2P has many tools that make/use 2D rendering.

Anyway, there was a small problem when drawing curves. They are more difficult to render when they have these two properties at the same time:
1) to have very strong or sharp curvatures;
2) to be too thick.

In this situation, some curves were not drawn smoothly as they should be. It's what I show you in the first image below. You see a curve skeleton and its version with a thickness of 150. Basically the thin curve shows how smooth it really is, but the thick one is not that smooth.

I improved Maccala and now it has adaptive curve drawing. In practice, it means Maccala can draw perfectly even very thick regions that are too curved. The second image shows the same curve as before, but perfectly drawn using my adaptive rendering algorithm.

Now Picture to People can draw super professional 2D vector curves even in the more unfavorable situations. It can help, for example, to draw in higher quality a thick outline of some very weird and complex True Type fonts.

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Warping using mouse drag and drop - a better example

Warping with mouse can be used to create strange or funny images from photos or drawings. The functionality is intuitive, but depending on the result you want, you need to be patient and be good with mouse.

In fact, a most common use of it for professional design is like a auxiliary tool for photo retouching. Many times it can't be use lonely for this task because it's able to remove some kinds of regions only marginally.

First you see the original part of a face and after a warped version of the same image. I created the example above with some dozens of individual warping operations using my mouse. The tool configuration used was deep in path and very restrict in neighborhood.

Would you like to try it to see how you would deal with this kind of tool?

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Real-time warping just using mouse

I'm developing a tool to let final user warp bitmaps.

Each deformation is made in real-time just using mouse drag and drop. No grids, no control points. I think it can't be easier or more intuitive. The warping is local, directed, and affect only the region around the mouse (and its path).

I have already made an example to show here. First you see a normal "a". After you see the same letter "a" warped by my model. This second image was created playing a lot with the original image. It's the result of a lot of accumulative warpings made with mouse.

This tool is getting great, but it still need some more improvement and some degree of configuration too. I'm working on it.

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Just vectors?

A lot of people has been asking me about the "duality" of my software: raster & vector based tools. People say they see here almost only drawing and vector stuff.

In fact, in the very beginning of my researches years ago, I was a specialist in raster filters/effects, most of them artistic for photos or text. But, since 2007, I focused in the vector based libraries of my software.

Anyway, soon I will try to put here one or two posts about the raster effects I have already created. This way people will have some idea of what I'm talking about.