Some of you may remember the vectex plugin, that allowed you to use svg vector files (as you can make in inkscape) as a texture.
But it was never reliable, and quite limited.
Mato has been working on a blender version with the code built in, and using a different library which works way way better. Yay! Read more about that development here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1419893
So I’m working on a character/scene to show off those capabilities, still very very WIP. You can see… very very crisp results, great for toony characters… and see the zoomed in image… still ultra crisp. Try that with an image texture!
Awesome! Yeah, this is great stuff, might be using this build a lot! The character looks crisp and clean, unlike some of that crap on tv, urgh, those people are doing the cartoony look all wrong, ._.
Would be interesting to animate curve on a surface (type shrinkwrap animated svg or Beizer curves) great tool for style Toon, and also able to render Bezier curves render edges 2D/3d style
I am creating a girl character on Blender.
Someday I want to equip her with Japanese kimono using cloth simulation and SVG texture.
However, I can not do works such a fast and good job.
Texture plugin must prepare normal calculation code by itself, and vectex don’t have it.
So I want to get some code from image texture, but I don’t know how long time it will need.
That’s cool. It’d be awesome if you could get it working with normal maps, but I understand that’s probably much different than just applying a color texture. Thanks for doing this!
Why not use nodes? After all bump mapping is just a gradient calculation so you need to tap 4 pixel values from the color texture, turn it into grayscale ( luminance best ) then apply the calculation using nodes and feed this in as a normal texture. Not tried it but it’s doable per-pixel so no preprocessing required. If you even store the texture in the proper color format you can skip the calculation and simply tap the color and deliver it as a normal. Might be doable this way for simple normal maps.
interesting. I might play around with that build. Just downloaded it.
When you load the textures, can you turn off mipmaps and filtering? The edges look like they’re getting a little fuzzy on the textures. Not too badly, or anything, but assuming they’re already being anti-aliased by the SVG functions, the need for filtering is moot, maybe?
I like the look, tho. Definitely looks good on a toon-style character.
Currently QtSVG’s anti-alias setting is always enabled.
Is it better if it can be disabled?
And vectex is not using a blender’s OSA function, so Render panel’s Render sample button(5,8,11,16) is currently not affected to rendering result.
But vectex use something of OSA function to calculate texture’s resolution, so OSA button should be enabled.
Mip-Mapping is to fight against rendering problems. It’s not a smoothing technique but an anti-aliasing technique. So you can leave the smoothing on of the SVG stuff. Helps for when you are really close. As soon as you are a bit away from the surface mip mapping kicks in anyways.
I saw Squiggly_P’s Avatar image, and think there are people who want totally non-antialiased image like icon image using only 64 color etc.
I tried disabling QtSVG’s antialias and rendered some image.
That image still have something half tone color with their edge.
Probably to create totally non-antialiased image I must set image color type not ARGB32 but Index Color at QtSVG’s rendering time.
