Your idea about hinting for icon rendering is exactly the same as one I had last year when working on am icon set for a medical company last year! Perhaps it's outside the scope of blender to create such a system, but I certainly believe there is potential for the idea. I was thinking about trying to implement it in inkscape later this year, but had forgotten about it. This gives some new interest for sure ;)
Luke On 11/6/11, Stephan Aßmus <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > -- Sent from my mobile device >From Luke _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
