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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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did that pivot ever really work? I know Adobe renamed Flash, and I haven't talked to anyone in the cartoons space since then, but it seems like innovation/attention to the Flash toolchain died with the player.

We used to use a tool called flump to rasterize flash animations for iOS games (I ended up writing our runtime and renderer in Unity and later SpriteKit to consume that data). I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to build an exporter from Flash (the program, now Animate) to this runtime if the features are fairly compatible.

Flump was a fantastic tool in the early mobile days when there wasn’t really anything else to create quality 2D animations. I also wrote a few Flump runtimes and have since written a few more runtimes utilizing the Export as Texture Atlas feature in Adobe Animate. If the goal is to just render the rasterized output from the exported texture atlas animations it should be pretty simple to create a converter.

If the goal is to render vectors I imagine it is more complicated due to quirks in how Macromedia triangulated their vectors, but someone has done it before http://blog.bwhiting.co.uk/index.php/2014/03/17/introducing-...

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

#112
post #5

Is the idea to supplant lottie?

Seems so: https://rive.app/blog/rive-as-a-lottie-alternative

I'm excited about this. As that post explains, it's very hard to have anything beyond basic interactivity with a lottie animation. It looks like Rive provides much more facility for interactivity. Also if it works I can cancel my Adobe subscription.

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

#113
post #100

Man, I was literally at their booth in GDC 25 minutes ago. Truthfully the program they have looks fantastic at empowering UI/UX designers to do more with games. I'm not sure if everyone is aware, but the normal flow is that a UI/UX designer will spend days in Figma; give the output to a programmer and the programmer will (often) say that it's impossible to implement for X,Y reason. What follows is a back and forth be…

i've often thought that if i were a UI/UX designer, i would want to work in games. most productivity software already has deep-rooted paradigms and abstractions, and attempting to challenge any of these results in grumbling users. in video games, however, a novel UI/UX decision is usually met with curiosity rather than irritation. presumably this can be ascribed to the user's frame of mind when they sit down to do work versus play a game.

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

#114
post #73

This problem seems to create a continuous stream of software attempting to solve it with no definitive solution. It's kind of strange, because there is a single objectively correct rendering for any vector graphics scene given a pixel sampling function and colorspace metric (the one where each output pixel's value is the closest representable color to the convolution of that function with the scene, expressed as a fu…

I think you've got a point here. 2D rendering is reasonably well defined. The problem is the overwhelming complexity of the GPU ecosystem. If you just had a decent parallel computer, it wouldn't be so hard. But instead you have to adapt your rendering logic to the particular combination of pile of hacks your GPU infrastructure supports, each having an exquisitely unique set of limitations and tradeoffs. You'll likely…

I poked at this a few times over the years, think my initial intent was to add SVG textures to Blender.

What I always found is the 'good' renderers were a small part of a massive project (totally impractical to add as a dependency) and the small, standalone ones weren't necessarily 'good'. I think I found one (nanoVG IIRC) that could have probably been beaten into submission with some hacking but that was around the same time I was winding down my involvement in Blender.

A quick peek at the code seem like this is exactly what I needed those 15 years ago and it just so happens I have some python bindings that could be easily be ported over to this if anyone is interested.

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

#115
post #100

Man, I was literally at their booth in GDC 25 minutes ago. Truthfully the program they have looks fantastic at empowering UI/UX designers to do more with games. I'm not sure if everyone is aware, but the normal flow is that a UI/UX designer will spend days in Figma; give the output to a programmer and the programmer will (often) say that it's impossible to implement for X,Y reason. What follows is a back and forth be…

i've often thought that if i were a UI/UX designer, i would want to work in games. most productivity software already has deep-rooted paradigms and abstractions, and attempting to challenge any of these results in grumbling users. in video games, however, a novel UI/UX decision is usually met with curiosity rather than irritation. presumably this can be ascribed to the user's frame of mind when they sit down to do wo…

This would depend, I reckon, on whether ones emphasis was on user experience or user interaction.

Games are great for user experience, because gamers are, by definition, looking for an experience. They aren't there to get work done, they want to have fun. So a fun interaction paradigm, with creative visuals, sound effects, various game-related skeuomorphisms: all of that is what they want.

User interaction, on the other hand, is about keeping the software from standing between the user and what the user wants to do. A large part of this job is insisting that developers don't do surprising things, but rather, stay within the lanes of expected interactions for the platform. There's room for creativity and novelty, but the budget for those must be spent carefully.

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

#116
post #83
post #64

I like this a lot, but it represents a turning away from desktop technology (as in having a native editor as a desktop app) that just makes me say “no”.

It has an open-source format, you can create animations yourself as well. Plus this renderer is literally a desktop app, isn’t it? It is as cross platform as it gets, with this project being the most optimized implementation.

Just because it's open source and I can create animations myself (by hand) doesn't mean either solve the underlying problem that we are killing off desktop application technology.

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

#117
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the GPU tech used and the committer names in that repo, I'm pretty confident this will at very least compete with both Skia and Pathfinder. I'm not super familiar with Vello. These are solid tech choices by people who know what they're doing... definitely worth the effort to check its performance and quality out for yourself. These GPU-first renderers all have slightly different approaches and each probabl…

> I'm pretty confident this will at very least compete with both Skia and Pathfinder Couldn't Vello be embed / used by Skia, Cairo et al, if those renderers wanted to use GPU Compute instead of CPU's for preprocessing?

Skia does include some support for using Vello for rendering but it's just experimental, not enabled by default.

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

#118
post #100

Man, I was literally at their booth in GDC 25 minutes ago. Truthfully the program they have looks fantastic at empowering UI/UX designers to do more with games. I'm not sure if everyone is aware, but the normal flow is that a UI/UX designer will spend days in Figma; give the output to a programmer and the programmer will (often) say that it's impossible to implement for X,Y reason. What follows is a back and forth be…

Agree that designprogramming handoff is tedious but curious where you think UMG is lacking. I’ve found it pretty fun to implement UI in once I got the hang of it.

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

#119
post #100

Man, I was literally at their booth in GDC 25 minutes ago. Truthfully the program they have looks fantastic at empowering UI/UX designers to do more with games. I'm not sure if everyone is aware, but the normal flow is that a UI/UX designer will spend days in Figma; give the output to a programmer and the programmer will (often) say that it's impossible to implement for X,Y reason. What follows is a back and forth be…

It's unfortunate that Unreal Engine is so bad at UI/UX these days. I was playing UT99 with some friends the other day and was struck by just how powerful, intuitive, and flexible it's UI/UX was, both in-game and through all the configuration/server browser/etc. menus. It's one of the first times I've really like like an old man yelling about how the modern equivalent of things is so awful.

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

#120
post #51

This is really exciting to see for me personally. I've been pushing over the past six months or so for multiple clients, from healthcare companies with basic mobile apps to deep gaming companies / products, to adopt Rive over Lottie and other past solutions, as I think it's finally hit its stride and is "ready-for-adoption". This was the last piece that came up in some of those discussions as a potential concern (lat…

Maybe this is a basic question, but why?

Lottie is becoming fairly established as a file format and the workflow is well established and fairly simple.

What does Rive do significantly better warranting pushing for it?

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