OctaDraw - Mini Bezier Drawings in FF!

Since we don't have real vector drawing in FF, it has been a royal pain to add any custom shapes to filters. Here is an attempt to change that. While it doesn't make vector drawing easier per se, it does make reusing and sharing created images incredibly easy. "OctaDraw" provides a different approach to creating and, more importantly, storing bezier images.

Here's an example image that is drawn with a single Bezier Curve Control component:

Since the FF Bezier curve component only draws in one direction, you have to combine several to get a more complex shape. Well, with some trickery you can do that all in one curve. The trick? Use just one section of the Bezier curve to represent the whole image, and you can stuff way more information there.

As you can see, I've used one eighth of the curve to represent the whole image, which gives me 8 bezier curves over one image. I've then enlarged each of those images (curves) to full size of the image and blended them together. There are actually 4 pairs of two Beziers here; every pair has a "top" and "bottom" curve, i.e. one curve draws the top of the object and the other the bottom of the object. So we end up with a total of four objects that can be overlaid on top of each other.

Adding color to the separate objects, you can more clearly see what I mean:

Adding color is easy, a couple of Color Inputs and some blur and threshold for the outlines and you get something like this. The four separately drawn parts can be colored separately.

With enough patience, you can draw quite a surprising variety of reusable images:

Once I've worked out a user-friendly interface, you'll get to try it for yourself.

Testing it out on most useless things...

I see what you did there

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Ramlyn wrote: I also posted it as a request for FF 5 ( Bezier...... polygons ), hoping that FF could make it easier through a new component.

Actually that request was what got this thing started. We have been waiting for proper vector tools for quite a long time, so I thought I should give it one more try and figure out something that would hold us over until it does actually materialize in FF version X.

So cool!
I can imagine some cases where defining "left" and "right" curves might be more efficient than "top" and "bottom". For example, the letter "c" (in some fonts at least) or the "<" symbol. Is that trivial to do?

OctaDraw version 0.5 submitted!

(Not the final version, will make editing slightly easier.)

Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Submitted a snippet that does the basic drawing function for OctaDraw shapes, for your filter-building pleasure.

Great! I'm pondering what my first set will be. Social icons?

WOW! This is really awesome and amazing what you have been able to do, congratulations.

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ThreeDee Note that this filter is meant for creating the drawings, separate filters will be made to use, style and create effects with the drawings. That's the main beauty in this method, you can just copy and paste the Drawing Input curve from one filter to another in the front end. As well as save all your drawings as presets.

Cool and interesting to use the shapes created in other filters