Hi all, this is my first post to the list. My name is Stephan Aßmus and I am a contributor to the Haiku project, www.haiku-os.org. I stumbled over a tutorial about using Cycles and this has renewed my interest in Blender. Blender is pretty powerful, but I think it is still not approachable without doing Internet searches and following Tutorials (for example I had to look up how to close views, or stumbled across Shift-A in a video tutorial after wondering how I even create new objects). However, awesome features such as Cycles makes potential users more willing to take these steps, such as in my case. :-)
One thing I really like about the interface, is that it is scalable by providing a device DPI value in the preferences. The only problem with this approach is that icons are scaled up and look blurry. Maybe a solution would be to store all icons in a bigger resolution, but it won't be perfect. For the Haiku project, I have developed a scalable vector icon format which takes extremely little disk space to store, and is very fast to render without artifacts, since it is using single pass compound shape rendering based on Anti-Grain Geometry. Some of you may be familiar with this awesome 2D graphics framework. I have tried to search for previous discussion on this subject in the Blender world, but nothing has shown up. Maybe I didn't look in the right places. My icon rendering as such would not solve the blurriness as is. But it has the potential to achieve this. Just as text rendering uses glyph hinting to align the shapes of glyphs to device pixels, a similar technique could be used for rendering scaled vector icons. But it should be difficult to do it with a general purpose vector format such as SVG, versus a dedicated icon format in which meta information can be given to shapes. For example, my icon format already contains a mechanism for making shapes disappear or appear in certain ranges of global scale. The format and renderer could be extended to support tagging shapes for being pixel aligned at render time. One post I stumbled across suggest that the original format of the Blender icons is SVG. The one editor which exists for creating icons in my format does support SVG import (and export), but the import is quite limited. One drawback of the idea is that all icons would have to be worked over to make use of all the features of my format (sharing of paths and styles) to benefit from the possible small disk size. And my icon editor only exists for Haiku at the moment. :-) But is there even some general interest in this idea? To learn more about the format, I just found out there is even a Wikipedia page (while looking up my articles): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_Vector_Icon_Format Best regards, -Stephan _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
