This is really charming. The interactive demos make the technical explanation much more approachable. One feature that might be fun is replay/exporting the stroke process, since the wash spreading is part of what makes it satisfying to watch.
Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
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Re: Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
#22Beautiful! Love the fluidity. Great for calligraphy.
> While I've tidied up a bit, the rest of this article contains plenty of AI-witten prose.
This is the right approach. I have no problem with someone using AI to draft a presentation (especially a technical one like this) -- just say it upfront and then people have no reason to get upset.
Re: Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
#23Why is just having the web page loaded in a browser's (Firefox) tab ramping up the iGPU on my computer to 75%? The GPU load is consistently 75% whether I'm drawing or just have an untouched web page. MS Edge has the same behavior with GPU loading regardless of drawing or not, but the GPU is at 50%.
Did you read the article? Each demo canvas is interactive and running multiple shaders per frame. They could probably reduce power consumption by having a play button on each demo canvas, or pausing the simulation after a sufficient amount of time has passed and things have stabilized, but yeah. The reason your GPU is being used is because it's being used.
Re: Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
#24Very cool app and very well explained throughout! I enjoyed peeking under the hood and learning those details like sampling a lower res flow field. Thank you for creating and sharing this
Re: Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
#25amazing idea and writeup! The only missing piece is to make it PWA (make it open as 'normal' app, especially on a tablet pc) it takes just adding icons, manifest, service worker - https://gist.github.com/sigman78/f1d8ceaf645b4dd773ff7bcaf64...
Re: Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
#26The examples display a degree of vorticity that I have never seen in real life watercoloring. They look great superficially, but they look super weird at reasonable inspection. Water on paper does not flow nearly so freely.
I agree, some of the examples look very nice, but some have small-scale vortices that really don't look realistic. That said though, lovely site and project!
I'm not sure "realistic" is important here. It's just art, and watercolors aren't known for being hyper-photographic to begin with. Instead, this enables... while it shows some ability to imitate digitally what watercolors can do on paper, it also shows that it can do things that physical media can't do at all. It's quite brilliant, and I wish it was in Gimp or even Inkscape. Can these images be stored as a sort of "vector"? To be able to go back in and dial down the vortices that you don't like (or to dial them even higher)? To design the water flow underneath as a field of sorts. Would be sort of awesome.
Re: Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
#27Very impressive work, thanks for sharing!
Re: Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, some of the examples look very nice, but some have small-scale vortices that really don't look realistic. That said though, lovely site and project!
I'm not sure "realistic" is important here. It's just art, and watercolors aren't known for being hyper-photographic to begin with. Instead, this enables... while it shows some ability to imitate digitally what watercolors can do on paper, it also shows that it can do things that physical media can't do at all. It's quite brilliant, and I wish it was in Gimp or even Inkscape. Can these images be stored as a sort of "…
> I'm not sure "realistic" is important here.
Whatever may be important to you, the website clearly presents itself as trying to realistically represent watercolor. It's a fine-ish first order approximation if you squint real hard, but doesn't capture the dynamics of watercolor.
Re: Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
#29The examples display a degree of vorticity that I have never seen in real life watercoloring. They look great superficially, but they look super weird at reasonable inspection. Water on paper does not flow nearly so freely.
Could one fix the paper on the bottom of in a container with just enough water in it to get a similar effect?
Re: Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
#30The examples display a degree of vorticity that I have never seen in real life watercoloring. They look great superficially, but they look super weird at reasonable inspection. Water on paper does not flow nearly so freely.
There's a 'flow' slider I turn way down when actually painting with it, but I leave it high by default because that's the most "cool" feeling setting for a first interaction :)