Freehand Drawing in ASP6

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 4:46 am

Hi rogermate,

What you are asking for is 100% possible with Lua scripting. I know because I believe I'm just a few steps away from being able to do it.

One thing people should know is that Anime Studio DOES use the same Bezier curves that most other vector tools use, it's just the handle positions are calculated automatically. Part of Fazek's legacy was deriving the exact method that Anime Studio uses to caclulate these handles. This is important as it means that all of the cool algorithms out there for operating on Bezier curves can be applied to Anime Studio's curves!

One such cool algorithm is Bezier Clipping by Nishita and Sederberg, as it very efficiently lets you calculate the intersection of two Bezier curves. As part of a scripting commission for realsnake Script Request, I implemented this algorithm for Anime Studio in one weekend of maximum hair-pulling and minimal sleep. Once you can find the points of intersection of two shapes, boolean operations are quite straight forward, so a brush tool that can add or subtract from existing shapes would be highly doable. I would also like to extend it further to make it fit an existing shape to the combined brush strokes so the effect could also be animatable. The thing is I've become quite the materialist lately, so the question is would anyone be willing to pay for such a feature?

InfoCentral · Post by **InfoCentral** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 6:28 am

I might be willing to download it for FREE if it works correctly.

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 6:42 am

Motivation level falling....

ulrik · Post by **ulrik** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 7:32 am

Rudiger wrote:The thing is I've become quite the materialist lately, so the question is would anyone be willing to pay for such a feature?

If the price is right, I will be paying. What kind of money are you thinking of?

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 8:22 am

I was thinking something like a donation of around $50 would be enough to give it priority over my other projects. It doesn't matter whether the amount came from just 1 person or 10 people combined. It would still only be a token amount compared to the work involved, but it would be enough to indicate to me that it would be useful enough to people to make it worth my time. Don't get me wrong, I will get around to all of these ideas eventually, so the donations would just be a way of speeding things up.

ulrik · Post by **ulrik** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:41 am

I understand, so far it's only realsnake and me willing to pay so that would be 25 each right? it's a bit too much for me at the moment, maybe if more people were interested.

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:59 am

ulrik wrote:I understand, so far it's only realsnake and me willing to pay so that would be 25 each right? it's a bit too much for me at the moment, maybe if more people were interested.

Actually, I'm counting the realsnake commission as a separate job, so it would be $50 just for the brush tool. rogermate seems pretty interested, and I remember blue talking about almost the exact same idea, before I knew about the Bezier Clipping algorithm.

ulrik · Post by **ulrik** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 11:36 am

Ok, I understand

Blue · Post by **Blue** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 4:36 pm

Rudiger,

I'm interested, but I'd like to know more of what you plan and exactly how the tool would work. Maybe start a new thread under scripting.

rogermate · Post by **rogermate** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:13 pm

Hi Rudiger,
I'm all for capitalism, which by the way used to be a defining characteristic of the U.S., but I digress.

I was commenting on the original posters point more as an intellectual exercise than as a direct need. Having said that, I would gladly contribute 10 or 15 towards your total - particularly in light of your morph dials scripts contribution. Which I haven't had time to actually use.

On the mechanics of a payment, you could easily set up a paypal account and then others of us could easily "email" you a payment - just like buying something on eBay.

There are two "social" issues. One is the great contributions by many other script authors, and I would hope that they would not feel in any way slighted, that all scripting started to follow a paid model. (I've failed to quickly find appropriate wording for the second issue).

I'm curious if your routine would be proceduralized, and thus to the extent that other scripting uses might more easily incorporate the functionality.

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 11:50 pm

Thanks for your thoughts guys.

rogermate: Yeah, I am very conscious of the social implications too. I acknowledge that a lot of the scripting I've done is based on Mike's and other scripters' work and I would like other scripters to be able to build on some of my contributions too. That's the main reason I'm shying away from selling tools as standalone products.

Blue: Feel free to make suggestions on how you think it should work. I think we already had a discussion about it somewhere else. What I've basically got in mind is for it create filled shapes based on your strokes, adding to existing shapes with ctl key is pressed and subtracting when alt key is pressed, but I'm open to suggestions. It would make sense to give priority to suggestions by people who have donated of course. I think what I'll do is make it an option to my existing freehand tool mod, rt_freehand.lua, so we can continue the discussion at that thread.

Anyway, if anyone wants to make a donation, they can do it with PayPal to the following email address: alexical at internode dot on dot net
However, before I start on this script, I really want to finish debugging the new version of my nudge keys script, which should be done by the end of this week.

rogermate · Post by **rogermate** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 6:30 am

Rudiger wrote:
Anyway, if anyone wants to make a donation, they can do it with PayPal to the following email address: alexical at internode dot on dot net
However, before I start on this script, I really want to finish debugging the new version of my nudge keys script, which should be done by the end of this week.

I read the post with the custom draw tool, but don't understand something. My understanding was that this post was about a brush, which would be used to form shapes. But the other post seemed to be talking about lines - with variable width. Which is it, or is it both?

Not sure if this follow up question would mess up the other posting so I put it here. Should I ignore this thread going forward?

Was it a typo, or are there two dots in the email?

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 7:58 am

rogermate wrote:
Rudiger wrote:
Anyway, if anyone wants to make a donation, they can do it with PayPal to the following email address: alexical at internode dot on dot net
However, before I start on this script, I really want to finish debugging the new version of my nudge keys script, which should be done by the end of this week.
I read the post with the custom draw tool, but don't understand something. My understanding was that this post was about a brush, which would be used to form shapes. But the other post seemed to be talking about lines - with variable width. Which is it, or is it both?

Not sure if this follow up question would mess up the other posting so I put it here. Should I ignore this thread going forward?

Was it a typo, or are there two dots in the email?

It was my thinking to simply add the shape brush feature to my rt_freehand tool as a toggle option in the top toolbar, so you would be able to easily switch between painting in strokes and painting in shapes. Also any additional improvements I make to the freehand tool would automatically be shared with the shape brush feature. So yeah, please put any further discussion about this feature in that thread.

And yes there are two dots in the email (separated by "on").