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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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