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Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

graphite.rs

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Re: Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

#51

Post by Keavon »

nicoburns wrote: post #50
Keavon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I'll open it up to the community to suggest Graphite's inclusion in lists like that one but I'll abstain from doing that myself. I should mention that, at the present moment, the only category we'd appropriately fit under is the Illustrator alternatives. Next year we will be building towards raster editing as our next core competency, but vector editing is the only one we've focused on so far.

Really looking forward to having something with decent vector AND raster capabilites. That niche is currently unfilled unless one wants to run an old version of Fireworks in a VM...

I keep reading occasional people talk about Fireworks with a wistful bygone "what could have been" for raster + vector. That's older than my era (although I was old enough to grow up making Flash animations and games) so I never got to know Fireworks, but I do hope to finally build a worthy solution after all this time. The neat part is that, in Graphite, raster content (brushes, patterns, noise, filters, effects, Mandelbrot Set fractals, etc.) is procedurally generated on-the-fly at the current viewing resolution, just like vector content. So they both interact harmoniously in a way no other editor has been able to manage.

Re: Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

#52

Post by adastra22 »

Keavon wrote: post #37
airstrike wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered using Iced? It can be hard to figure out at first but it's blazing fast, cross-platform and can compile to WASM. It's also _beautifully_ designed. Importantly, it's both "just Rust" and "very Rust". You can stay on the yellow brick road and kinda just get the app out there with incredible multi-threaded CPU + GPU rendering performance from the outset... or dig deeper and go into advanced stuff. Pe…

It was a top contender when I was picking a GUI solution but it didn't meet the cut. Remember that this was 3.5 years ago. The decision to go with HTML/CSS was undoubtedly the right one and it'll continue to treat us well for the foreseeable future. But we are beginning to rewrite certain areas, like the node graph, in our own render stack because this streamlines the code best. And other widgets like histograms, col…

I sincerely doubt you will be able to match the performance of native widgets with immediate-mode render libraries.

Re: Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

#54

Post by lionkor »

Keavon wrote: post #36
bufferoverflow wrote: post #24

The appeal of Blender for me is not just the open-sourceness, but also the fact that everything in it is programmable. Any action you can do via UI, you can do by calling some Python method. Why create a new project instead of advancing InkScape though?

Graphite is built to be a programmatic data processing pipeline that takes the form of a render engine and WYSIWYG editor. You'll be able to write custom code for every part of the system. And because it's time for a fresh start. Sometimes you can't turn around a heavy ship, and that ship doesn't want to be turned around. It's easy to write a sentence like that, but once you actually think about it, how does an outsi…

Absolutely - as with so many large open source projects, the maintainers and community are (rightfully) going to be sceptical of any newcomers.

This leaves only three options:

1. start contributing to the project slowly, try to get into their ranks, participate in conversation, and hope that you share the same vision

2. fork it and learn the codebase by yourself

3. write your own

Out of those, given the obviously conscious choice to go with Rust, and the ambitious goals, the third option is the only one that makes sense.

Re: Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

#56

Post by Keavon »

lionkor wrote: post #54
Keavon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphite is built to be a programmatic data processing pipeline that takes the form of a render engine and WYSIWYG editor. You'll be able to write custom code for every part of the system. And because it's time for a fresh start. Sometimes you can't turn around a heavy ship, and that ship doesn't want to be turned around. It's easy to write a sentence like that, but once you actually think about it, how does an outsi…

Absolutely - as with so many large open source projects, the maintainers and community are (rightfully) going to be sceptical of any newcomers. This leaves only three options: 1. start contributing to the project slowly, try to get into their ranks, participate in conversation, and hope that you share the same vision 2. fork it and learn the codebase by yourself 3. write your own Out of those, given the obviously con…

Exactly! The only thing harder than making something so ambitious would be doing it in a huge legacy codebase with an existing leadership team fighting against someone vying to rock the boat. Being new is an opportunity, not a flaw. It means there's a lot of work to do, but that's tractable with the right organization structure that I think we've successfully managed to build— and it's something other projects really struggle with, so starting fresh in that respect also avoids problems from cultural elements that could very well be the blame for the inadequacies of those existing projects.

Re: Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

#57

Post by jokethrowaway »

wg0 wrote: post #34

This is amazing. I love Inskcapke but I think this tool is too good. It makes me very excited to see tools that are built as web apps because more gravity on web means more capabilities for the web platform which is more open and accessible. Rust is great - amazing. I presume it is compiled to Web Assembly. I'm just wondering how and why these three passionate gifted individuals didn't go Round A, Round B Investor fu…

You won't get funding for a vector editor.

Re: open weight models Most of the innovation happens within companies who use OSS to either appeal to developers or to destroy potential competitors (think Meta spending a fraction of its ad revenue just to ruin the market for OpenAI / Microsoft) Some individuals get grants from VCs who want to make a name in AI for themselves for the cost of peanuts (eg. a16z sponsors some models)

At the same time, for wealthy tech people with skills and a well paid job (think 300-500) raising capital is not always an attractive proposition. You'll likely have a lower salary when doing your own startup and if it turns out your open model can't make enough money you'll just have a bunch of worthless equity and 1-2 years of high stress / pressure.

Re: Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

#58

Post by virtualritz »

I opened a medium complex SVG and the app became unresponsive beyond useable. After scaling it down by manually entering the scale values I could not find the SVG any more (the Align... buttons in the top bar are always grayed out/not implemented yet, it seems).

Every update (even moving the canvas around takes 1-2 secs on my laptop.

TLDR; looks like this is redrawing everything every time which makes it useable only for very simple projects atm, unless I miss sth. I.e. needs caching of vectors as bitmaps/textures of some sort.

Also doesn't seem to support OpenEXRs yet? They won't show in the file browser.

Screenshots look great and I love the node editor's mapping to the layer stack.

But as always with Graphite it's still unclear to me how many of the screenshots show actual functinality and how many are mockups or the functionality behind some UI elements is simply not implemented yet.

Re: Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

#59

Post by timeon »

crabmusket wrote: post #29
Keavon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upon rereading that paragraph, I suppose I didn't write that as clearly as I'd meant to. Blender is darn near perfect and there'd be no reason to replace it. So yes, as you figured out, I'm referring to becoming a second Blender but this time in the 2D realm: a generalist tool that uses actual innovation to catch up and then surpass its commercial competitors.

Graphite is to Photoshop as Blender is to 3DS Max?

Reminds me more Affinity Designer than Photoshop. Since it is also for vectors. In Adobe land you need two apps for this. (Well actually three - omnipresent Creative-Cloud eating the resources in background.)

Re: Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

#60

Post by wg0 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #57
wg0 wrote: post #34

This is amazing. I love Inskcapke but I think this tool is too good. It makes me very excited to see tools that are built as web apps because more gravity on web means more capabilities for the web platform which is more open and accessible. Rust is great - amazing. I presume it is compiled to Web Assembly. I'm just wondering how and why these three passionate gifted individuals didn't go Round A, Round B Investor fu…

You won't get funding for a vector editor. Re: open weight models Most of the innovation happens within companies who use OSS to either appeal to developers or to destroy potential competitors (think Meta spending a fraction of its ad revenue just to ruin the market for OpenAI / Microsoft) Some individuals get grants from VCs who want to make a name in AI for themselves for the cost of peanuts (eg. a16z sponsors some…

Figma comes to mind. But yes, your rest of the analysis follows on the dot and makes perfect sense.
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