Software Tech for Digital Eastern Calligraphy 東方書法軟體技術

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). 

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.

Calligraphy done with circle as brush footprint in 'Royal e-Pen'

Second appearance of Chinese calligraphy in Apple's launch video (2015)

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?

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)

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]