u2 Bleank's blog

CEO and co-founder of Bleank. Demoscener as coder in PoPsY TeAm. Passionate by real time graphic programmig, graphic design, much more...

[u2bleank]

I’m working on the pixel ReadBack mechanism for Black Ink. It’s not en easy task because GPU doesn’t expose this kind of feature by default ( in any case until DX11 ). And I want to preserv the compatibility of Black Ink with DX9, so Compute Shader isn’t an option. Moreover Black Ink rely heavily on virtual Texturing which mean that we are not guarantee to have the full Canvas texture ( or layer ) in memory when a Pixel Need it. All those constraints are why we haven't implemented Pixel Read Back ( or pixel Gather ) in Black Ink. This feature is absolutely necessary to achieve a smudge blur effect which is one of the more requested feature for Black Ink. Anyway I finally took the time to implement a first test and it's seems to be quiet effective. I'm not entering into the detail because I'm a too lazy doc/blog writer but I can tell you that the performance is far better than I thought in the first place and I hope it will be one of the killer feature of Black Ink which will give to user Smudge Blur like effect

[u2bleank]

Straight Line V2 for Black Ink early test.

[u2bleank]

Some brush than before but with different parameters

[u2bleank]

R&D for a new kind of Bursh for Black Ink

[u2bleank]

WIP of a log panel for Black Ink

[u2bleank]

First Test for the secondary viewport of Black Ink. It should be a great feature for artist ;)

[u2bleank]

Finalizing brush stroke input smoothing for the next release of Black Ink

[u2bleank]

The integration of more panels in Black Ink move forward. Here some work in progress

[u2bleank]

I'm working on a DockingContainer class for the Bleank's framework. It's starts to work. It was not as easy as I thought because of some tricky cases. But I quiet satisfied with the current result. The final version will be implemented in the next version of Black Ink

[blackink-drawing]

Snail made by u2bleank

[u2bleank]

Friday drawing time baby !

Little piece made a simple round pen and some copy paste with the transform tool .

[u2bleank]

This week I was at the Revision.

My First non Frecnh demo party since the Take Over 2000.

The excellent Live coding compo has inspired me to make my first ShaderToy effect.

It was a lot of fun to develop even if it was a pein in the ass with my Laptop( I've got 0.5fps on it ). I hope I will find the time to make more in the future. Link to the Realtime version

[blackink-drawing]

[u2bleank]

No more energy for coding but enough to make this piece. Friday doodling using some of upcoming features of Black Ink ( layer merge, Transform, Drag&Drop image from explorer )

[u2bleank]

I’m working on Trace Modifier for Black Ink. This features will be available for all brushes. This system will modify the course of the line in real time accordingly parameters (and controllers). For example this stroke modifier is adding a SinWave to the current position.

Or this one is computing a rotation orbit around the current position.

Thanks to the current controller engine Trace Modifier is greatly customizable and user-friendly to create behaviors in function of Pressure, speed, etc... This modifier is helpful because he keeps the continuity of the tracing without any crack or hole in it. Furthermore In the next version of Black Ink a new brush type will be introduced: the SimpleCurve which will render a smooth continuous curve and not a following of shapes like all brushes (except the Crepe) in Black Ink now for a better performance and homogeneity in the rendering.

The caveat is its not 100% perfect if there is some transparency and if the brush is really big (due to self-overlapping)  but for thin lines it is excellent (in result and performance). In the future the Trace Modifier will be used in jointly with a MultiBrush system to create stunning effects ;)

[blackink-drawing]

Flower Siggraph 2013

made by u2bleank

[u2bleank]

Some R&D tests usefull for BlackInk. Here a simple Brush with another shadow stroke. I find the result funny.

[u2bleank]

This video exhibit some custom tools, infos panels, floating winodws & UI to Debug & Profile BlackInk whitout any development environement. This is very usefull to track performance leack in a live sessions on user platform. You can also save a profiling session for later analysis...

Bonus : you can also see the new layer panel who will be added in the next release of BlackInk

[u2bleank]

Layers are on the way

I currently worked on layers for BlackInk This is the number one Uber priority feature who everyone request. The engine is already shipped on the public version but the feature is not exposed because there's still some work on the interface.

Today I just finished the implementation of the proprietary file .BKD ( for BlackInk Document ). Who will contains all layers datas ( who can't be preserved in simple .png file ). I don't have the time for the moment to handle a real .PSD file but it's an option for the futur. To test the current layer functionality I did this little painting using a reference image, different brushes on different layers. Nothing special except the colors who are more vivid than ever ( compared to BlackInk prior version 0.111, ).