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Adobe's claim on Fresco's Live Brushes

8/11/2019

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So they claim to be more realistic/accurate

At Adobe Max 2019, Adobe claims Fresco's "Live Brushes" are more accurate and realistic than any other apps out there.  This statement was made by Adobe's Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky.  We feel compelled to compare their and our watercolor simulation:

Watercolor

The above video comparing the two apps' watercolor simulations and illustrate several differences. First, we use physics to model the deformation of our virtual brush, allowing subtle variations in the strokes. Because it's a 3D virtual brush that you can wield, you can e.g. making a gradient by loading different colors along the brush tuft and tilting your brush just like in real life. Fresco uses stamp to model the watercolor brush, so the above natural brush manipulation is simply not possible. Second, we use Computational Fluid Dynamics  to model wet watercolor for really natural flow patterns. Close examination of Fresco suggests that they use expanding 'waves' to model spreading   watercolor. Such modeling often gives  artificial-looking 'turtle-back' patterns. Another important point is that our flow is global instead of being restricted to stroke vicinity like in Fresco. This keeps Fresco from being able to create large-area flow patterns - a major contribution to the charm of the watercolor medium. Lastly, you can't see subtle details in Fresco's rendering when you zoom in. In contrast, Expresii can render the artwork in much higher resolution with details. 
Picture
Adobe Fresco's watercolor simulation often result in "turtle-back" patterns

Oil Paint

We also beg to differ when they say the oil paint simulation in Fresco is more realistic.  Our Computer Graphics Researcher & Developer Dr. Nelson Chu previously worked at Microsoft. His main contribution there is the oil and pastel model found in Project Gustav, which later is productized as Fresh Paint.  His work addresses the problem of missing details in oil or pastel modelling found in many other paint apps. Look at how organic are the oil paint and pastel strokes in the following video:
And here's Fresco's oil paint:
Both shows ridges and color mixing, but which one you say is more organic or feel like real oil paint?  If you ask me, I think Project Gustav / Fresh Paint is better in capturing the details and is closer to what real paint does.

Color Mixing

Another aspect  Adobe  put effort into make digital paint more realistic is color mixing.   Many paint programs simply use RGB color space (native to digital systems) and alpha blending in their tool.  Some complain Blue and Yellow don't make Green but a muddy gray. (btw, it's arguably cyan and yellow that make green and you can get a green if you mix cyan and blue in those digital systems).

Fresco's  color blending  is  probably based on this research paper . You can easily get a nice green from blue and yellow, but that's applied on watercolor only.  Yellow and blue oil still gives muddy gray:
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Adobe Fresco's color mixing. Left: oil paint. Right: watercolor.
For comparison, the app   Artrage also addressed this issue since many yeas ago:
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Color mixing in Artrage. Left: 'Real color mixing' OFF. Right: ON.
PictureReal color mixing (by ChrisH407)
Perceptually I find the green in Artrage a bit artificially too bright (but hey, those blue and yellow are artificially  pure to begin with). So here I prefer the result from Adobe. However, in real world we often get a even darker green, like in the excerpt pic on the right (click to see the video on youtube).  Only cyan+yellow would make such a bright green.  Real paint chemicals also blend in a more complex way to give non-linear behavior and thus the difference.  But if you ask me, I'm okay to use simple RGB or CMY model native to computer, treating 'computer' as just another brand of paint.

Conclusion

I would say Fresco is definitely not the most realistic or accurate when it comes to simulating watercolor and oil all in all. Their color mixing is nice and that's the only part you can possibly call it more realistic, if we consider it's blue + yellow (RYB model) instead of cyan+yellow (CMY model) giving green.  

Please leave your comments below to let us know what you think.
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Software Tech for Digital Eastern Calligraphy 東方書法軟體技術

24/4/2017

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Brush as a Simple Circle

When Apple   introduced the Apple Pencil, I was thrilled to find out the Apple Pencil supporting tilt. Eastern calligraphy appeared two times in their launch video. The first one is writing '書'  in red (below). 
Picture
First appearance of Eastern calligraphy in Apple's Pencil launch video (2015).
From the video, it seems the brush is only modeled as a circle i.e. strokes are made by sweeping a circular shape, scaled by the pressure applied. Years ago, there's a team from Taiwan making a tool named 'Royal e-Pen (神來e筆)' specific for Chinese calligraphy (video right) and that's basically the same software tech they have - modeling the brush as circle. When we were young,  we used to learn calligraphy by writing on top of model calligraphy (‘描紅’ as they say in China).  Teacher would say the worst crime you can commit is filling up strokes by going back and forth like what you do with coloring books. 
When your brush is  only modeled as a circle,  your brush footprint is rather different from that of a real brush and you might need to go back and forth if you want to conform to the model stroke shapes. To me,  using a very simple model like the circle to do calligraphy is fine as long as someone finds a good way of writing without awkward 'gap-filling' motion and that the resulting strokes are nice-looking.  Unfortunately,  sometimes you get sausage-like strokes (right), which is not very pretty.

Brush with Bristle Effect

The other appearance of Eastern calligraphy in Apple's video uses a more elaborated rough brush footprint to give a bristle or scratchiness effect (below).  The app used seems to be Procreate, which is a very nice painting app, btw.
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Calligraphy done with circle as brush footprint in 'Royal e-Pen'
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Second appearance of Chinese calligraphy in Apple's launch video (2015)
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The script rectified. I read '秋月' there.
Since its early versions, Painter has been using 'dots  within a circle' as the brush footprint to give a 'bristle' effect (video below).  Procreate seems to use a similar method to do bristle effect - the dab could be a captured image instead of one generated on the fly.  Interestingly, Adobe's 3D brushes give effect similar   to what these 2D brushes give  - the 3D nature seems to be not put into good use. In fact, when Samsung's latest Galaxy Book tablet was announced, demonstrators actually had a hard time showing off the new pen tilt feature with Photoshop, because no matter how they tilted the brush, they still got strokes as if  done in 2D without tilt support. By the way,  when a brush is enlarged, why does  it start to sprinkle smaller version of itself?
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Adobe's 3D brush design with "individual bristles" [1]

Our Efficient 3D brush model

In order to capture the nuance we normally get when using a real brush, we devised a more efficient 3D brush model. By efficient we mean we don't need to model it as 'individual bristles' as in Adobe's 3D brushes [1], and yet we believe we get more stroke variations than they do.  Our brush model also looks and acts more like a real brush instead of a brush made of stiff wires.  All in all, we believe our brush is the most natural and intuitive to use among all paint apps available today.

I can only recognize two characters '秋月'  from  what is written in the second appearance of Eastern calligraphy above so let's try writing the same characters in different styles in Expresii: ​​
And another demo  '筆墨'  for you.  In Expresii, every stroke has  its own character, its personality.   You can 't make the same stroke twice.
And I love doing designs like the following using Expresii.  You can do designs quickly and easily just like using a real Chinese brush.
And don't just take our words. See what Shaun Bryant has to say:
I'm loving how quickly and easily I can make vastly different marks in Expresii
​- Shaun Bryant, Visual Development Artist @ Dreamworks Animation

High resolution Rendering

We all know that raster-based paint programs are good for stroke richness  but you can't really zoom in too much.  Adobe came up with a solution of generating vector graphics  [1] for high resolution rendering.  For this to work, you're effectively  switching entirely to their vector-based tool, namely Illustrator.  When enlarged, you see many individual polygons overlapping each other (below). Personally, I don't think it looks too pretty nor natural, not to mention the added burden of rendering thousands of polygons.  ​(๑´╹‸╹`๑)
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Picture
Adobe's solution for hi-res rendering with their 3D brushes (images from [1])
We came up with an entirely different solution to the fat pixel problem. We can zoom in a lot, but the marks still look natural.   ​ Jony Ive ended Apple's launch video with "gives you the ability to touch a single pixel".  And here I'd like to say we give you the ability to zoom in a lot without seeing a single pixel.  ( ̄▽ ̄)ノ​
In summary, we hope to ​do Eastern Calligraphy justice with our software tech :
  • 3D brush model capturing nuances 
  • High-res rendering up to 12k x 12k

Cultural Significance

People complain  about the younger generation  being occupied by gadgets and  too few are doing traditional arts. If you are an educator involved with art or East Asian languages,  please consider joining us for this digital calligraphy  revolution. Technology  and art are not mutually exclusive. You can start teaching digital calligraphy today. Together, we'll work to revitalize this ancient art form.  Leave a comment below or message via Facebook, Twitter or whatever. Thank you!

Reference:
[1] from their paper "Industrial-Strength Painting with a Virtual Bristle Brush", 2010. [cached copy]

2017.04.30 Update:  we are informed that the piece of calligraphy was done by  Prof  王冬齡, and in the video, the shot should be showing him signing his name '冬齡'.  [ref 1] [ref 2]
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Use Of Fluid Dynamics For Painting 流體力學的使用

26/7/2016

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PictureCurtis' painting took 7 hours to render in 1997.
I know many of you are artists and may not be too aware of the historical development in the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for watercolor-like digital painting.  I think it's  useful to give a summary here.  

Cassidy Curtis  et al. was the first to apply  CFD    in watercolor painting  [SIGGRAPH 1997].  He used what is technically called Explicit  method (which requires taking small time steps) in solving the fluid equations. He was able to render one painting at 640 x 480 pixels in 7 hours on a workstation-class machine.​ At that time, fluid simulation was believed to be too slow for interactive applications. 

Two years later Jos Stam published a paper called Stable Fluids  [SIGGRAPH 1999].  He proposed to use a 'Semi-Lagrangian' method to solve the fluid equations so that large time steps can be taken in the simulation iterations to allow user-interactivity.  Because the implementation is simple and that he also released sample program for it, his method was widely spread. "Everybody can have his/her  own  happy meal and fluid sim",  so to speak.  At that time, usually simulation was done at a resolution of 256 x 256 pixels or lower.  

Later in 2003,  Mark Harris et al. adapted Stam's method to the GPU  for better efficiency.  Today,  maybe 95% of interactive fluid sim's out there (e.g.  this   &   this)   are based on Stam's work.  
​
Note that Stam in his  2003 paper  wrote:​
The idea of tracing back and interpolating which lies at the heart of the advect() routine apparently goes back to the work by Courant et al. [Courant52]. It has since then been rediscovered by many researchers in various fields and is generally classified under the heading of “Semi-Lagrangian” techniques. Parts of our work are also protected under U. S. patent # 6,266,071 B1 [Patent].
Above: A demo of Stam's 1999  fluid  solver.
​Below:  One of the many implementations by others.
acknowledging  that  what makes his solver special was actually something that had been done before.  While I'm not a lawyer, we are not sure if anyone implementing Stam's method for a profit would infringe their patent or not.  That might be one reason why many Stam's-based fluid sims we see today are mostly  'experiment' or 'toy programs' instead of commercial ones.

In 2003, our Nelson Chu started  working on simulating Eastern ink on paper.  He found Stam's method not very  accurate if large steps were taken to maintain 
Nelson's 2005 MoXi demo
interactivity,  so he looked for alternatives.  He  finally adapted a CFD method called Lattice Boltzmann  and the results were presented in his  MoXi  SIGGRAPH 2005   paper.  ​​ If you take a closer look, you will find that Nelson's method produces more realistic ink dispersion compared to that of a usual Stam fluid sim, the latter being more like smoke in space  than ink on paper.  After Nelson resigned from Microsoft in 2011, he continued to improve the simulation method and that's what went into Expresii you see today.
PictureWave-like behavior in Rebelle's watercolor sim
Another painting simulator featuring CFD is Peter Blaškovič's   Fluid Painter,  apparently  started in 2009  (judging from the earliest comment there).  Peter didn't state what method he used, but it looks very much like one based on Stam's without much change.  His other paint program Rebelle  that came out in 2015 doesn't seem to model watercolor faithfully  since the spread is like waves that bounce back and forth off the boundary (see above) and the results lack minute flow details. They might actually be using shallow water equations to model the flow.

The   Verve Painter by Taron came out in 2014.  Taron  also didn't state what fluid sim method he used, but if he based it on Stam's, at least he adapted the fluid density to volume and added shading, brush options, etc,  making impressive results possible. 

In around 2013, nvidia  entered the tablet market with their own mobile chip & stylus. With that, they also developed the paint app Dabbler (2014-2015). They modeled the viscosity of oil and the flow of watercolor but it's not clear if actual CFD was used for watercolor since the effect is mostly just blurring away the colors, which can well be done with burring instead of CFD.
 
Oh, there's one more:​ Adobe's new Adobe Sketch for iPad that came out in 2015.   Adobe licensed MoXi in 2006, but apparently they finally didn't really make use of our fluid code.  However, now you see this watercolor sim in this 2015 iPad app, whose effect is similar to what we had back in our 2005 MoXi, maybe somehow simplified since the flow is mostly an expanding motion and seems no free flow (see the Expresii video on the right) is possible. Adobe usually publishes paper on their research work (like in their previous attempt on watercolor, which uses some improvised physics and polygons instead of CFD), but so far we haven't found any documentation describing the tech behind this.  

Okay, that's all paint apps with CFD for watercolor-like effect that we are aware of. 

p.s. There were also attempts to use CFD for thick, oil-like paint simulation (e.g. Bill Baxter's), but that's another long story so we restrict ourselves to watercolor-like painting here.

Update 2016/10/22:  I think we should also show our Expresii here too, just for the record.  The video on the right shows Expresii running on a mobile device, namely a Windows tablet powered by Intel processors.
Above: Taron's  Verve Painter (2014)
Below:  Nvidia Dabbler 3.0 (2015)
Above:  Adobe Sketch's watercolor (2015)
Below: Expresii on a tablet (2016)
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Tackling The Fat-Pixel Problem 放大時可以不見像素嗎?

8/7/2016

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Today, often   digital painting  s are done in less than 4k resolution, and you might be further limited to e.g. 2k when you use   computationally-intensive tools like Corel Painter's watercolor. If you zoom in, you will see big fat pixels.  You can't  print it large  -  it looks fine on a computer screen but printing it  on a piece of paper  would  make the resolution  insufficiency prominent.  In fact, even our screens are  getting higher and higher resolutions.  In 2007 ,  Sony showcased a 4k  projector as a  very advanced piece of equipment - but now it's no surprise if you see a 4k screen around, be it desktop or mobile. We're more urged to address the resolution hunger than ever.

A Pure Vector Approach as Solution?

In late 2014 the new painting app  Mischief   made a splash  being acquired by  The Foundry.  Mischief's infinite zoom  is their core competence over  other painting apps. However,  infinite zoom has always been a feature of vector-based representation - and   Mischief is in essence  a vector program.  The issue was just that most previous  vector-based  tools are more like  a designer's  tool rather than a painter's making it hard to do painting fluidly. BTW, infinite canvas is also not new, as at least Rita offered such feature years ahead in 2006 and is vector-based too. 
PictureMischief's vector strokes. Now where's the promised painterly quality?
Like in most vector-based tools,  the lines made by Mischief are crisp (except for the one brush that gives a dithering effect, which is another kind of  crispness if you will), which is good for line arts or sketches.  But if you regard the artwork as  a 'painting',  these lines are  too clean.  You can add more strokes to get more painterly, but with too many lines the system would slow down  as  details created by    every line  has to be redrawn every time you pan your screen - even with the advanced   Adaptive Distance Field (ADF) tech   behind it and that it is said to utilize the GPU for accelerated processing.  ​​Technically, if the number of strokes is N, the redrawing is of order O(N). *  

Previously we covered Adobe's vector approach to do watercolor on the ipad  in this blog entry.  Essentially it also  looks good on spec, but not that great in practice. When enlarged, you see many individual polygons overlapping each other (below). Personally, I don't think it looks too pretty nor natural, not to mention the added burden of rendering thousands of polygons.  ​(๑´╹‸╹`๑)
Picture
Picture
Adobe's solution for hi-res rendering with their 3D brushes (images from [1])

A more Painterly Approach

In Expresii, we take a rather different approach  to the fat-pixel problem.  Our  representation is somewhat between  pixel- and vector-based.  If  the  canvas/paper  resolution  is  M, our redrawing  is of order O(M), independent of N.  This is a property of pixel-based tools. However, our magic is that we are able to zoom in a lot - a lot more than what  existing   pixel-based programs  offer given the same amount of paint data.  We may call this ' ​Good-Enough Zoom' (vs.  Infinite Zoom).  This is somehow akin to audio sampling  -  our ears can only hear up to 22KHz  so sampling up to double of that namely 44KHz is 'good enough'.  In real world  painting,  someone might draw a tiny figure, but he or she is not likely to add every detail to that figure.  As a viewer, if you can zoom in  so that you can see the fibers in the paper,  that's pretty enough too.  

Do we  need infinity zoom?  For cases like showing  the world reflected in  a girl's eye, yes.   For such cases, people without infinite zoom could simply make drawings at multiple scales and switch between the drawings  (which is what people currently do) so it's not really the end of the world.

In Expresii, we don't claim to do everything.  We can't do infinite zoom.  Our canvas/paper is finite, which is  actually closer to a real-world painting experience - you have a frame to anchor your work.  Instead of infinity canvas, Expresii  offers extendable paper.  Our end result is a  rather organic looking painting that we can zoom a lot into.  The strokes and flows are extremely  natural   -  unprecedentedly   natural. 

GPU Acceleration

Not only our ink flow simulation utilizes the GPU power.  Our rendering  engine (which we call Youji  有極 for marketing purposes ;-) is also GPU accelerated.  Given a decent graphics card, you can pan and zoom silky smoothly.

BTW, we are really glad to see a steady growth of GPU hardware. We used to require an expensive discrete graphics card,  but now even an integrated GPU  can do the job fast enough. Interesting side note:   When Nelson  was speaking at the Adobe Headquarters in San Jose back in 2006, a Senior Photoshop Scientist was bashing the use of GPU.  I think he was like laughing  at a person building the Internet at its early stage - hey network is so slow, why bother.  Well,  if you can see the potential early, you will be heading in the right direction.  Now, even  Photoshop itself is getting more and more GPU acceleration. 

Best of both Worlds

Articles about Mischief often praised it taking the best of both worlds of vector and raster. Mischief promised  'the richness of pixel-based brushes'. Yet in reality we don't really find the promised richness of textured brushes like those in Corel Painter or Photoshop. Furthermore, operations like smudging or blurring, which are trivial for raster-based tool s, are not possible or at least the maker still can't demonstrate such possibility^.  ​

In contrast, Expresii really gives you the richness of pixel-based tools. You can still blur a stroke (we don't have a separate blur tool but you can do so by stroking with a clear brush or use our new Pusher brush mode), not to mention our extremely natural ink flows efficiently executed on the GPU all thanks to its pixel-based nature. However, Expresii also has its vector personality - you can zoom in a lot as if there's no pixels.  We believe Expresii is a true innovation in the history of digital painting, really  'taking the best of both worlds'. Give it a try today and see for yourself!
Reference:
[1] from their paper "Industrial-Strength Painting with a Virtual Bristle Brush", 2010. [cached copy]
*  In ADF there is only one distance field to be sampled but the sampling needs to be more refined  when a new stroke comes in, thus causing the complexity to be O(N).  However, in practice Mischief is performing quite fast even with large number of strokes.
​

^  Update 2016-12:   development of Mischef seems to have stopped.   
Founder and Chief Scientist   Sarah Frisken   even left the new company founded  due to the Foundry acquisition.  Head of that company  Chris Cheung , who moved from Autodesk's Sketchbook, also left the company.  Update 2019-10:     madewithmischief.com is finally closing in Dec 2019.
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iPad Pro vs Windows Tablets

19/9/2015

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The recently announced Apple Pencil supports tilt sensing on the iPad Pro. On the Windows side, there have been more and more new tablet models  supporting on-screen stylus too but none of these new comers does stylus tilt.  It'd be great if they start to follow Apple's example in getting the tilt. 

We want tilt Sensing

So   far  among all Windows tablet PC's, only the  Wacom Cintiq Companion   offers pen tilt sensing.  In the following video that features a Cintiq companion hybrid, you'll see why   tilt sensing is so important in controlling your brush:
As Linda Dong  pointed out, the Cintiq has a number of drawbacks.  The following video was done with a  good   old  Intuos 3. The drawing is not 'on-screen',  but your hand and the stylus won't block your view:
Again, you see how important it is to have both pressure and tilt support in getting expressive marks - at least with our Expresii, that is!   And, yes, we think that Expresii's brush is currently the best in creation organic strokes without the use of pre-scanned images of some real brush marks.  It's much closer to what you would do with real brush and paper.  It's  not only the look that matters,  but also the interaction.  Spontaneity is the soul of Eastern inkwork.

it's the Software 

Like other artists have mentioned, it's now the software that either makes and breaks the deal.  Many of the painting apps on the iPad (and Android, for that matter) has limitations (like memory/resolution/quality) that keeps them from being used for serious work (except Procreate I'd say, which does a great job with GPU-powered painting). Frankly, the MS Windows camp probably would want to use us to fight back against Apple (since now Expresii is Windows-only) - what you can do with Expresii's advanced brush and ink engine can't be done on an iPad - even the Pro!  For comparison, let's take a look at Adobe's attempt to do watercolor on the ipad.  It sounded good on the spec  - you can zoom in a lot as it's vector-based, but what you get are some polygons which doesn't look nice when enlarged.  (Update: Adobe's new Adobe Sketch  has a  better watercolor simulator  now)
Picture
Adobe's attempt to do watercolor on the ipad (image from the 2013 paper 'Painting with polygons: a procedural watercolor engine').
PictureAuryn Ink review by Tara Donocan.
Maybe Adobe also realized that it's not that great afterall so they withdrew the app (Adobe Eazel)  from the  app store ending the app's short life. Another ipad app that does watercolor is  Auryn Ink.  However, as reviewer Tara Donocan said, the biggest problem is the low resolution - you can never print it out. 

All these apps' watercolor effects are local  in  that the ink only moves in your strokes'  vicinity. You will miss the global effects (and fun!) you get when using real watercolor which can flow pretty much all over the whole paper. 

Now, take a look at the two videos of Expresii below. The first one was done on an 8" Atom-Z3735-based  windows tablet (a 2014 model), which is too slow for a nice painting experience. The  second one was on  a 10.6" CORE-M based windows tablet released in the first half of 2015, which  I'd already consider faster enough. (Update 2016:  now with the latest version of CORE-M processor Expresii runs really fast enough on  a mobile device)

In conclusion, brush/ink/watercolor sim is not easy. With good hardware, we still need good software to run on them to unleash the full potential.

 I hope you like what we are doing here in Expresii.  Share your opinion and let us know what you think.
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Expresii on a US$150 Windows Tablet: Flow Demos (pt 4)

12/1/2015

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OMG! Wet Dream come true! 水墨淋漓如何?

PictureAdobe's video ad
Ladies and Gentlemen, what you're about to see would amaze you. Since the introduction of the Apple iPad in 2010, people have been dreaming about using tablet devices with realistic paint simulation to paint, and in fact, even the recent Adobe video ad "the future of Adobe creative applications on Microsoft devices" suggests exactly that.  
用平板配像真度超高的虛擬顏料畫畫,自從iPad 2010 年面世就有人夢想過。最近Adobe發了影片,內容是,將來他們的軟件配合微軟的平板可能會怎樣怎樣。其實片裡只是廣告效果,現在Adobe的軟件沒那麼神呢!

How about having the future *now*? Would you like to paint with realistic watercolor that flows as you tilt the surface? The flow should not be predefined with some kind of bitmaps that you load into the app, but react to your interaction. Okay, I'd let the video do the talking: 
不過其實逼真水彩/水墨,用我們的技術已可達成,且小平板一樣可用(雖然慢點)。多講沒用,看片:

This is done on a US$150 Windows tablet PiPO W5, with pen and touch support (palm rejection built in). Can you believe it!! Although it doesn't provide the silky smooth user experience you get from a desktop PC or a gaming laptop, its cost-to-performance ratio is extremely high. For comparison, if you're in the Apple camp, a pressure-sensitive pen like the Wacom Creative Stylus 2 would cost you $80, not to mention the ipad itself costs you at least $250 (for an old model). And, remember on the ipad   (in fact any platform),  you won't find painting app that does such a realistic watercolor like ours.  By the way,  the GPU inside the W5 is no match for the Tegra K1 found inside the    Nvidia S hield Tablet  ($299 lowest), and just imagine what we can do with such a powerful  GPU. 
雖然 Atom CPU 運行速度慢,但影片裡用的PiPO W5 的確性價比超高。8寸的大小,方便攜帶。你很喜歡 Wacom Cintiq Companion 但買不起?嫌它太重?那可以考慮PiPO W5 喲,才人民幣 888 (= 美金 142),萬一丟了也不太心疼吧。比較下如果你是用ipad方案,價錢也不便宜,還有就算用了Wacom專業畫筆,也不是每個app 也支持palm rejection 呢。

In the above video you'll see that every time you put down the paint the outcome is so natural, thanks to our full-fledged fluid simulation. The following is another demo showing the use of the brush in "sprayer" mode.
上面影片可看到,每次下筆,出來效果也不一樣的,這也是水彩/水墨可貴之處。以下影片裡有用‘噴筆’模式來下墨的:
You may say it's just a cool demo - it's not practical for creating art. Well, if you're a  watercolorist, you know the use of flow patterns. You can use those abstract forms for backgrounds, fills for your subjects, etc (see e.g. this video). The organic quality is really  irreplaceable.  Let me show you a piece we did:
你可能覺得這樣只是個玩具,實際上難用於繪畫?那下面給你看個示範圖吧:

This Gandalf in Chinese ink painting style was done on a desktop PC previously, with a "wash" layer that utilizes the paint dispersion and another  layer  used for line work. And, before you ask, yes, our simulation focuses on Chinese  watercolor now. Our Software Architect Nelson Chu would come back to Western media again later (At Microsoft, Nelson worked on oil and pastel simulation, which you now find inside Fresh Paint).
這幅水墨 ‘甘道夫’就是之前用Expresii 在桌面機畫成的。用桌面機比較快,比較爽啊!片裡是用W5打開並展示給你看。圖分兩個圖層,一為‘線條’,另一為‘染色’,傳統上說‘有筆有墨為之畫’,在電子世界裡可以分圖層多好啊!

Conclusion:   We are very excited by the recent development of Win 8 tablets. Finally software and hardware working together to make a dream come true! We're going to release the Lite version of Expresii first (preview  available  now), and the Full version later (no set date yet). 2015 looks like a good year for digital painters!
結論:沒想到 Intel 的CPU 進步那麼快!把我們 GPU-intensive 的水墨模擬放到小平板只是想試試而已,但出來效果絕不是Atom CPU一貫給我們的印象中那麼差喲!夢想,逐漸因軟件和硬件的配合而成真了。   ୧༼ ヘ ᗜ ヘ ༽୨   
我們會先推出 Lite 版本(Preview 現已可下載),之後再推出 Full  版。大家,看來2015  是數位繪畫的一年好年!

Support us by liking our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter. Help us spread the word!
如果你喜歡我們所做的努力,請多多支持,好讓中國水墨也能在數位世界發揚光大,謝謝!請讚我們的FB粉絲團啊~
You can download a 9k x 12k output of the Gandalf artwork here.  
‘甘道夫’超大圖output在這裡。
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What a digital brush should have been 數位畫筆,早該是這樣子

28/4/2014

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One Brush, Many Marks   -   No more collecting 'stickers' to give your strokes a different look. You don't even need to adjust any puzzling parameter in the app's UI. Just paint as if in real life. It's  a dream come true.

Just like Master Chef Martin Yan said, "one, two, three, four, five - and it's Done!"  

一支筆,不用調複雜參數,不用找不同的貼圖來貼,就可隨便畫出變化無窮的筆觸。手起筆落,就這麼簡單。數位畫筆,本來就該是這樣子。
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Now with the right tool, show me some  rhythmic  lines, won't you,  Master Painter?  什麼叫 ‘韻律’,畫畫的您會懂!
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And it comes with amazing details. Below is a closeup of the above stroke.  This is hard to achieve with any vector  or bitmap-based graphics tool out there. Simply put, Expresii is revolutionary in digital painting technology!
畫出來的線條還可以放得很大,這是任何現有基於 vector 或 bitmap 的繪畫系統都難以匹敵的!
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Isn't the details amazing?  媽,真的可以放得很大啊!
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What do we mean by 'organic'? 我們說的 ‘organic'

20/2/2013

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Why do we need motion capture for computer-generated animation? Because it is very hard to make natural-looking motion by dragging the control points of motion curves. Similarly, it is rather difficult to make a digital painting that features the organic charm and fluidity of watercolor simply by using put-that-color-on-that-spot type of operations.
為什麼做電腦動畫要用到「動作捕捉技術」?因為純粹用鼠標是很難拉出像真的動作的。而水彩的自然流動感,是很難純粹用現有的繪圖軟件畫出來的,因為其所謂的「電腦水彩」只會局部的擴散一點點,沒有真正的流動。
PicturePainting with gravity enabled in Expresii. 以《寫意》繪畫時可以傾斜桌子讓水自然流淌

In Expresii, you can finally have digital watercolor that flows. One that really flows (instead of just diffuses locally). Enough said.
《寫意》的水是真正會流動的,真正能做到氣韻生動,也體現了什麼真正叫做‘organic'。
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The outcome resembling a charming waterfall 效果自然,天人合一
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What do we mean by Ultra-HD? 我們說的‘超高清’

10/1/2013

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Today's HD resolution is 1920 x 1080. Expresii is capable of outputing to over 36x of that - should be enough for all your printing needs.  現在的‘高清’ 是1920 x 1080 像素. 《寫意》其實可以輸出其36 倍以上的大小,就算放大打印也綽綽有餘。
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Below is a sample output file at 12,000 x 8,192 (94 Megapixels). 以下是 12,000 x 8,192 ( 94 兆像素)的示範圖輸出。
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Zooming in to see the details... With a good GPU we get incredibly fluid zoom-and-pan manipulation.   可充分利用GPU 達到順滑的zoom 和 pan。
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Below is a close-up showing some very fine details. Thanks to the GPU, maximum in-app live zoom is so deep that you you might think this is actually a physical rather than a digital painting. Can you imagine doing live painting on a large 4K display?  以下是一局部放大,試想像用4K 顯示器來畫畫會有多酷!
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