Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Primitive – recreate your photos with vector-based geometric primitives

primitive.lol

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–24 of 24 posts

Re: Primitive – recreate your photos with vector-based geometric primitives

#21

Post by jnurmine »

fogleman wrote: post #10
jnurmine wrote: post #9

Roger Alsing (Johansson) did this in 2008: https://rogerjohansson.blog/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-e...

Indeed. I mentioned that in the README: https://github.com/fogleman/primitive#inspiration

I did skim that file through but missed it, sorry. It's worth pointing out in the comments here in case others miss it.

The comparison is interesting since your rectangle version has superior image quality compared to Alsings. If I squint my eyes it is hard to tell a difference to the original picture. It looks blurred the "right way" somehow.

Re: Primitive – recreate your photos with vector-based geometric primitives

#22

Post by fractallyte »

minimaxir wrote: post #8

An unexpected benefit of Primitive is that it helps create really cool animations (both by screen-recording the Primitive app as it renders the shapes for the image, and by working with SVG animation libraries on the web). I played around with it a couple years ago ( https://minimaxir.com/2016/12/primitive/ ) and it worked out surprisingly well.

You might be interested in Synthetik Studio Artist (https://synthetik.com/). Among (many!) other things, it can process images and animations and output SVG. There are operations that produce Primitive-style pictures, but also a huge number of others. And it's customizable! A graphics rabbit-hole...

Re: Primitive – recreate your photos with vector-based geometric primitives

#23

Post by 4mitkumar »

ficklepickle wrote: post #19
kccqzy wrote: post #14

Almost a decade ago I remember using an online service called Vector Magic to do this kind of stuff. At that time it was considered the state-of-the-art auto tracer. Is this noticeably better than Vector Magic when using Bezier curves?

I keep a windows xp VM around almost exclusively for Vector Magic. I've never tried it with photos though. Mostly for improving the quality of logos by vectorizing then exporting a higher-res PNG. Maybe I will finally be able to get rid of it. I can't tell right now, I think Primitive is being hugged to death currently.

Vector magic runs perfectly fine and does a great job even in high Res photos on Win 10. About 90 seconds for 2048x1433 image with some intricate details at high quality setting (as compared to offered medium and low quality settings) with unlimited colours.

But results are still pretty nice even at low quality setting with limited colour palette. Hardly takes 15 secs.

Post reply on HN