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.
Mischief'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)
 |  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.
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.
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!
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]
[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.
^ 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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