Progress Report #6 - Menus, Curves, and Procedural Art

March 1, 2018

Here is the video report for the month of February! IMPORTANT: make sure to watch the video in 360p or 1080p resolution (click the little gear icon on the bottom-right). There are playing issues in the other resolutions, it is presumably a bug in Youtube on some videos uploaded today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilngAe1EXuE

Thank you for your support!

Cheers,

Boris

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Okay, a lot of progress this month! I think it was a really good idea to only make one video per month. I think it really helped me to stay focused on what's really important: programming.

Here is how VGC Illustration looks now: there is a menu on top, and there is a toolbar on the left. In the menu, we can toggle visibility of the python console, and quit the application. So nothing exciting for now, but at least the menu is there and I'll be able to add new features soon, such as undo.

Okay, in the toolbar, there's a very important new feature: a color selector! So it's now possible to sketch in color in VGC Illustration, not just in black and white! So just to recap, we can now draw curves with variable thickness; we can draw them with the color we want; we can pan, zoom, and rotate the view; and the curves look smooth at any zoom level.

I've spent some time making sure that the UI looks great, using a dark color scheme, which I think is better than the light scheme I was using in VPaint. But because different users might have different taste, unlike in VPaint I'm now using a stylesheet technology which makes it possible for users themselves to customize the UI look-and-feel if they want to. So if you like your buttons to be green, no problem!

Finally, since the last video report, I made some improvements to the python console. There is now what is called an "interpreter prompt": it is these symbols on the left that tell you which lines of code were executed all at once. I'm now also using a monospace font which is more suitable for programming, and I've added the possibility to create curves programmatically with the console.

With all that in place, I was able to create some procedural art within VGC. If you're interested, all the python code for these images was made available to sponsors on Tipeee and Patreon, so, make sure to check that out.

Okay, so now that VGC is somewhat functional, I'm trying to create one drawing per day with it, and I post all of these on the VGC Youtube Channel, which I encourage you to subscribe to. Even though I'm not really good at drawing myself, I hope that using VGC daily helps me to detect potential bugs. And actually, you can see that there are those weird shapes at the end of some strokes. This is some problem I have from the pressure input of my Wacom tablet, and I hope to fix that soon.

That's it for this month! Thanks you for watching, and see you next time!