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Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

rive.app

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Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#41

It's so insane they don't offer any way to export movie files. The animation IDE is decent. Nowhere near as good as Flash was. But at least let me animate in it and export movie files. It's hilarious how so much new tech is just barely scratching the surface of what Flash offered in terms of a creative production tool. Every passive consumer fixates on Flash the plug-in and has no idea how incredible the tool was.

Their pricing page, https://rive.app/pricing suggests that they support MP4/GIF/PNG Sequence and WebM exports? Is that not what you're looking for?

Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#42
post #6

> It isn’t hyperbolic to say what you can do with Rive is about to change in an earth-shattering way. Actually, I think this is exactly what "hyperbolic" means

If it's not hyperbolic, I think we ought to ban this... Call me picky, but I think breaking the only planet we live on right now is a bad idea

Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#43

How does the rendering performance of this compare to something like Skia or Pathfinder? Note that the latter can also optionally do the paths-to-triangles conversion step using GPU compute, if the hardware supports that. There's also Vello for a more comprehensive compute-based approach to 2D rendering.

I'm looking forward to doing careful benchmarking, as this renderer absolutely looks like it will be competitive. It turns out that is really hard to do, if you want meaningful results.

My initial take is that performance will be pretty dependent on hardware, in particular support for pixel local storage[1]. From what I've seen so far, Apple Silicon is the sweet spot, as there is hardware support for binning and sorting to tiles, and then asking for fragment shader execution to be serialized within a tile works well. On other hardware, I expect the cost of serializing those invocations to be much higher.

One reason we haven't done deep benchmarking on the Vello side is that our performance story is far from done. We know one current issue is the use of device atomics for aggregating bounding boxes. We have a prototype implementation [2] that uses monoids for segmented reduction, and that looks like a nice improvement. Additionally, we plan to do f16 math (which should be a major win especially on mobile), as well as using subgroups for various prefix sum steps (subgroups are in the process of landing in WebGPU[3]).

Overall, I'm thrilled to see this released as open source, and that there's so much activity in fast GPU vector graphics rendering. I'd love to see a future in which CPU path rendering is seen as being behind the times, and this moves us closer to that future.

[1]: https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn/+/refs/heads/main/docs/da...

[2]: https://github.com/linebender/vello/issues/259

[3]: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/4306

Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#44

I've been looking forward to this ever since they announced it. Previously they used Skia and their entire app is (and rendering output was) built with Flutter. Now Flutter has a new rendering engine via Impeller which is more optimized than Skia for Flutter specific challenges. When I asked the Impeller team before what they thought of the Rive renderer, they said that it is great for vector graphics but Impeller ne…

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t fonts rendered from vector graphics already? TTF and OTF are vector formats, correct?

Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#45
post #20

There's a lot of active research around rendering 2-d vector graphics with GPU tessellation (Raph Levien's work for instance), so this is pretty cool that they're shipping a product with this technique. I've never used Rive so I'm wondering if its strictly for making cool animations or if it can be used for building dynamic UI's (the kind that you might use an immediate mode gui lib for)?

We have customers shipping full UI with Rive! Games have been adopting us (some cool AAA titles already in progress) and products too. https://rive.app/game-ui https://rive.app/blog/how-age-of-learning-uses-rive-to-a-b-t...

Bevy but not Godot?

Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to do some newer benchmarking, the Rive Renderer has gotten faster since these initial tests: https://twitter.com/guidorosso/status/1595187838454140928

Can you talk a bit about text rendering? How does it compare to slug? [1] Would it be suitable for rendering text heavy applications? (like, say, a PDF viewer, a code editor, web browser, etc). -- 1: https://sluglibrary.com/

The Rive renderer takes an animation-first approach to all path rendering, including text. Meaning, every glyph is redrawn from raw bezier curves with full precision antialiasing, every frame. (Just like any other path.)

This optimizes the smoothness of animation, is fast enough to render fullscreen pages on top of pages of high dpi text at 120fps (on a decent GPU), and the antialiasing quality is always full precision in the (0..255) color channels.

If you want more niche text-specific features like hinting and clear text, those aren’t supported because they don’t animate smoothly and/or don’t work as well with colors other than black and white.

I recommend trying all the options for your specific needs and finding what works best!

Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#47

Any chance of publishing the algorighm details? The main header (pls.hpp) mentions some links to private google docs.

Thanks for pointing this out! We need to make these public.

For the 10,000 foot view, watch our presentation at the WebGL/WebGPU meetup at GDC!

https://www.khronos.org/events/webgl-webgpu-meetup-GDC-2024

Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#48
Happy to see this!

Would love to see somebody try to re-implement some limited Canvas2D API but using Rive Renderer as a backend. Would likely be faster and more flexible in some ways (e.g. I've found that Canvas2D clipping is not anti-aliased in some browsers).

Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#49
So does this mean someome can create a free editor I can use for basic animation that I don't have to pay $25 for the rest of my life to use?

Edit* $39 per month if you don't pay for an entire year in one go. Wtf haha, anyone actually paying this for basic solo-dev work?

Re: Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source

#50
Is there technical documentation to understand the method behind the engine? because at first sight it seems like the classic "path flattening to polygon and then triangulation" that has been used for 20+ years (at Mazatech our first AmanithVG on OpenGL used that technique) but I'm sure there is more than that on Rive renderer ...to be recognized as a such powerful engine.
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