VPaint: An experimental vector graphics editor | Hacker News Reader

VPaint: An experimental vector graphics editor

vpaint.org

321 pointsjestinjoy151 comments

BTW when researching competitive advantage, I noticed Adobe dominated vector graphics, with postscript (and pdf) - apart from Macromedia's Flash, which was progressing quickly, including an optionally typed version of Javascript (ActionScript 3.0), with performance comparable to Java.

A few months later, boom, Adobe bought Macromdia. Retaining their monopoly? Since then, Flash development strangely languished...

Just sayin, keep going, and you may get a call from Adobe M&A.

Impressive. FYI, source is at: https://github.com/dalboris/vpaint

and the paper is at http://www.dalboris.com/research/vac/vac.pdf

Piggybacking to mention that the download links on their landing page are all hosted on SourceForge, but their releases page on GH has the same version (1.5) for all three platforms:

https://github.com/dalboris/vpaint/releases

I won't download any binaries from SF if I can help it, due to the recent unpleasantness.

Working on something kind of similar: - vector graphics/drawings created by freehand / writing http://write-live.com/d/dba21681-8d3f-4fbe-8b4b-e5c1983df934

http://write-live.com/d/8f9b7846-a7b9-4e5c-b704-dad9aa87d14e

- unlimited* levels of zoom http://docs.write-live.com/WriteliveServer/webview.html?d=34...

- draw on a tablet, view on tablet / web http://write-live.com/d/538254c5-7d31-41f2-83bb-bcd0a7cee7ab

A bit like if google docs had a baby with OneNote :)

Exploring now a possibility to render digital ink via webgl as Canvas poses performance problems for very complex drawings.

more elaborate drawings / samples:

http://docs.write-live.com/WriteliveServer/webview.html?d=2c...

http://write-live.com/d/8f9b7846-a7b9-4e5c-b704-dad9aa87d14e

http://write-live.com/d/f1b5c413-a291-4409-a549-93312cef7ca1

Nothing seems to appear.

You need a browser supporting w/s connections and NOT be behind a corporate firewall. Also, give it at least 10s if your network is slow.

Can write-live drawings be saved or exported to a file?

There's a way to export to SVG (vector) or JPG (raster) via REST but not exposed to end user just yet :(

For now you can right click and save the canvas as png

Actually it is exposed :)

example:

http://docs.write-live.com/resources/doc/8f9b7846-a7b9-4e5c-...

to get other documents you need to replace the documentId param

How is this similar? VPaint is a unique animation tool; your tool has no animation.

Hah. We have ideas to allow creating of animations in future releases. For now vector graphics is THE similarity :)

It's a damn shame that the executable downloads are hosted on SourceForge. I'd be willing to give it a try, but it'll have to wait until I have the time to go through the rigmarole of compiling the source code.

VPaint was recently migrated to Github; you can download the binaries/source directly from the releases page: https://github.com/dalboris/vpaint/releases

They migrated the project just a couple days ago, so I assume the download links on the main site will be updated in due time.

Awesome! Downloading now.

Thanks. Just say no to sourceforge.

I'm confused, what's the problem with them being hosted on SourceForge?

See here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/218764/warning-don%E2%80%99t-downlo...

and here:

http://www.information-age.com/industry/software/123459675/h...

etc...

The second article suggests GitHub has a similar problem and the first says that SourceForge has an opt-in policy. I can obviously understand people wanting to boycott SF but no-one is talking about avoiding GH downloads. Did I miss an element of this story?

I guess the main difference is that it is SF themselves that add some of the crapware in binaries distributed by them. As far as I know, Github have never done that.

That people may upload malware to their github repo is quite different.

SourceForge has been wrapping adware around executables http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/source...

As others have pointed out, SourceForge has become a malware distribution network.

I haven't seen evidence of malware, just adware wrappers from sourceforge. It's a small, but important, difference.

Depends on your definition of malware I guess.

It's hard to see exactly what SourceForge are offering because apparently they do VM detection and their installer is much better behaved when running in a VM, and most folks don't have a spare physical machine they can test it on and wipe afterwards. Which I think says a lot about how malicious their installers actually are.

adware is a type of malware.

It's literally one click away... or are you boycotting Sourceforge?

Isn't everyone?

Never had a problem with them - just don't click on the misleading ads (or block them) :-)

It's a .msi. You can download it, open in 7-zip, extract all the files, and run it directly. Quite frankly, it would've been better to distributing it as a single .zip file.

SF has not been touching anything other than .exe installers, so there is no problem here.

Very impressive tool. Not hard to pick up at all. It builds and runs on Fedora 22 without having to battle with dependencies, which is way easier than I expected :)

Flash actually can do very similar things with their IDE via Object Tweens. And yes in flags you could edit the interpolated frames and "adjust it" However, at least with my experience with flash, the interpolations never did exactly what you wanted, and this tool seems to better predict what is desired.

With that said, despite being free I am not sure if VPaint interface is that much better than Flash.

From my experience, Object Tweens "never doing exactly what you wanted" is an understatement - they're pretty much useless for any non-trivial shape, not doing anything remotely sensible.

There seems to be a lot of room for improvement in 2D interpolation, and their video shows stuff that looks impressive enough. I'd have to try it to form an opinion, of course... I hope I will find the time

Flash doesn't support shared edges or multiway joins which sound pretty crucial for non-trivial animation work. VPaint is based on Vector Graphic Complexes (http://www.dalboris.com/research/vgc/) which supports both.

Watching the SIGRAPH video... isn't this basically how Flash animation works? Does anyone know the major differences?

It does seem like this technology is either old or just a decade or two too late. Aren't there ways nowadays of generating 3D models from 2D sketches that would serve better for this kind of intuitive topology animation?

If you know about such ways, please do tell, it'd be great... I haven't heard about anything along these lines that is actually used in professional work.

What about [1] for example. I'm also thinking about the growing trend of technologies related to auto calibration such as Microsoft's Photosynth. It seems pretty certain to me that 3D modeling is the future of animation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbUljHJv4Rg

[1] is pretty cool! I don't think it's quite production-ready; first of all it's simply very new (2014), and then the 3D models seem to me to need manual polishing, and most importantly, this demo doesn't mention animation, which I guess would require the same rigging and then control manipulation as you'd do with hand-modeled 3D, and you'd run into the same limitations as with normal 3D rigs (with some things "breaking the rig".) I wager that the 2D approach in TFA has a different set of limitations and these will be preferable to some.

Still, cool stuff! I wondered when something like this will show up.

Most of the examples they used in the video are topology changes in 2d that results from motion without topology changes in 3d, so you have a good point. But animation of topology changes is not a subject that has been well researched yet, in 3d or 2d, so if you're interested, it might be worth looking into exactly what is new here and why its coming out now.

In case you don't know about SIGGRAPH, it has historically been the best showcase of breaking graphics research and techniques. That doesn't guarantee something is new or good, but its one of the best first-order approximations there is, so, even when a SIGGRAPH paper looks simplistic or old-hat to me at first, I will generally give it the benefit of the doubt, because multiple experts in the field have reviewed it and found it worthy, so chances are I'm overlooking something.

From what I understand:

In flash you could only interpolate state between two key frames in a fixed level of freedom.

Their method allows the level of freedom to vary between key frames.

The video explains it visually.

No, this allows you to animate the splitting and merging of edges and vertices. I don't think flash supports that.

Is an API on the roadmap? Before 2.0?

So is this kind of like Flash and Illustrator rolled into one free product?

If so that's pretty amazing.

Homebrew Cask request: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/13121

When compiling, as specified on Github [1], I get a SIGSEV

[1] https://github.com/dalboris/vpaint#linux

Anyone get this loaded on windows 10 ?

phpBB and sourceforge? what a throwback!

Version numbering is that 1 is beta. Why are people fine with this but when KDE did a KDE 4.0 with publishing saying don't include it with your distro they got killed.

P.S. I think all beta should any number people say it is beta and people shouldn't get mad about numbering.

So I do a post on why people should not get mad at Beta numbering and I get 4 down votes Nice. Maybe it is because I missed a word "be" before any number. Just say why you don't like the post and don't just down vote. Let your voice be heard instead of being passive. Engage with differences.

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