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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The best text effects

Picture to People official website already is 2.5 years old and already received more than 2,500,000 visitors (the counter is public at the site).

After a very long and hard work, we already have the biggest set of online professional Computer Graphics tools around the Internet, and there are much more coming.

To celebrate, I created an official "Hall of Fame" at Picture to People site. There I show many amazing text effects created by our beta test team and regular users exclusively by using our tools. This page is open for anybody who wants to participate. For sure there are uncountable effects and results to be discovered, tried and used, so anyone who gets a great image can send it to be shown in our roll. I will publish new samples from time to time.

Feel invited to visit The Best Text Effects page. I hope this page with some of our best text effects shows how powerful Picture to People is and inspires people trying to find more and more nice ways to use our graphic softwares.

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Professional light text effects

I have been studying and implementing light models and algorithms for at least 3 years. I have developed, more than a year ago, a library to render light effects. I have even created some light text effects, but I didn't publish them, because they were very slow to calculate.

These last months I made a huge effort trying to create from scratch a new fast library focused on rendering lights. I finally did it and this new library is not just faster, but better than the old one. Now I'm developing a big collection of ready to use light text effects. Many users have asked for it since Picture to People is online.

Below I show you some examples about what is up to come: professional results with no configuration.

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Picture to People now has font effects

Have you ever wanted TrueType or OpenType fonts were able to make a little more? Have you ever wanted to change a little an usual font face? Well, I did.

I created a tool to go beyond the traditional font rendering engines and turn regular fonts in something more complex or more stylized. It's our first tool totally focused on typography. If Picture to People usually releases "text effects", we could think about this like a software to make "font effects".

Below I show you a text made with a regular font and so two typographic transformations created using the same font as input.




This new feature was already released at the Typography Effects page.

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Maccala improvement: Polygon filling modes

During these last years, this blog showed the development of my 2D drawing library called Maccala. I really passed through many problems and challenges since I started it more than four years ago.

Nowadays I have a very comprehensive, professional, powerful and robust library for 2D drawing, font rendering and vector based effects, but I knew it had a point to be solved: the polygon filling modes. Since its first days, the library had only the alternative filling mode. I always knew about this weakness, but I have let it behind, since its only mode always was enough to my needs until now.

Currently I'm developing a new sub-library especially to make typography effects. At this point, the lack of another filling mode became a barrier to creation of my new effects.

I'm (finally) implementing the winding filling mode in Maccala. Since it's more complex by nature, I'm taking a big care about performance, so I can draw using any filling mode with no (or very few) performance penalty.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, let's put it simple: the winding mode can be imperative when filling some kinds of polygons that have self-intersection. This kind of polygon is very common, mainly when you make some operations like polyline thickness widening.

Below there is a simple example. First I show a self-intersected polygon. Second I show the same polygon filled using the alternative mode. As you can see, a colateral effect of this technique is that, in this case, the polygon is not completely filled. Finally I show the winding mode applied to our polygon. It has the behavior we usually want in this situation: the polygon is totally filled.

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Picture to People on Facebook

Now Picture to People project has a profile on Facebook. To be honest, it's the first time I use it. Usually I don't have time to spend using this kind of social tool.

Anyway, I want P2P gets closer to its users, so let's see what happens from now on. Visit Picture to People page on Facebook.

If Picture to People tools are useful for you, or if you support our project, please like us on Facebook. :)

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Ray traced 3D text

You can't imagine how tired I'm nowadays. I'm studying and working until getting crazy. At least, I'm getting some very expressive results.

Well, let's go to what matters. Despite I'm working on many different fronts in Computer Graphics now, today I will talk about 3D software again. Ray tracing complex objects like 3D text really takes to much time, so this subject takes too much time from me.

This problem is really harder than I wondered before. Complex shapes do have many polygons - without a library (like OpenGL) that couples to a modern video card, rendering them is really a slow job. It comes to be a very big problem when you need to generate very high quality results. The rendering time increases exponentially with the rendering quality.

Problems apart, the library to render ray traced 3D text already is partially functional. Below I show you a teasing sample. Notice the very professional anti-aliasing level.


I would like to post more frequently like in past years, but unfortunately I'm not able to. The stuffs I'm working on are more complex than before, I have too many libraries in my schedule to make and now I have the P2P site to develop and maintain. I don't even have time to rest.

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Cloud text

Some time ago, I told here that people would not worry about trying to use smoke text effect to create cloud text. It was because I would develop a tool specifically to render cloud texts.

Well, time has come. I have already released a feature at Picture to People site to generate nice cloud text effects. It uses 100% procedural algorithms and has several styles to choose from.

Below I show an example about what you can create by using the Cloud Text tool. By the own nature of clouds, usually they have a certain kind of mix (fade) with environment. Having this in mind, be aware the background color you choose has a big influence in the resulting effect you get. You can click the example image to enlarge it.

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Ray Tracing 2

I'm still working on my ray tracer. For bad or for good, currently I'm very obsessed with my 3D libraries. I can't finish some other graphic effects because I don't stop studying and researching about advanced 3D math and algorithms.

Recently I implemented some nice improvements concerning material properties and configurations. Below I show you the same image as before, but rendered using different materials with finer settings.

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Ray Tracing

Nowadays, my 3D libraries are very robust. Probably they are almost so mature as my 2D vector based libraries, although they are less than two years old. Some weeks ago, I thought it was already time to create my own ray tracer, a really powerful one.

Well, it is under development. It's already fully functional and has very professional quality. Now I have going through many challenges, because I don't want it the way it is.

I need something very beyond what I already got: I want the same quality, but at least 20 times faster. 3D rendering optimization is a very hard work if you need it in a very deep level. This subject is heavily researched by many people and it has been a very important area of Computer Graphics for at least 20 years. Unfortunately, my experience shows the best algorithms are never published for good.

Anyway, I need to overcome this challenge, or will not be able to publish graphic tools based on ray tracing. My software has NO dependencies, so it uses NO libraries or even hardware acceleration. It needs to be VERY fast in its own essence and I'm working on it.

A text with 20 letters made using a complex font can have several thousands of polygons. To get professional quality, even when rendering a small image, the software needs to test dozens of millions of ray-object intersections. If everything goes as I want, I will be able to render complex shapes like 3D text in a reasonable time, so I can release it at Picture to People site.

Below I show you an image rendered using all power of my ray tracer (there is no background plane).

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