vello
msdfgen
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vello | msdfgen | |
---|---|---|
31 | 27 | |
1,936 | 3,699 | |
8.2% | - | |
9.4 | 6.5 | |
3 days ago | 5 days ago | |
Rust | C++ | |
Apache License 2.0 | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
vello
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Rive Renderer – now open source and available on all platforms
I'm looking forward to doing careful benchmarking, as this renderer absolutely looks like it will be competitive. It turns out that is really hard to do, if you want meaningful results.
My initial take is that performance will be pretty dependent on hardware, in particular support for pixel local storage[1]. From what I've seen so far, Apple Silicon is the sweet spot, as there is hardware support for binning and sorting to tiles, and then asking for fragment shader execution to be serialized within a tile works well. On other hardware, I expect the cost of serializing those invocations to be much higher.
One reason we haven't done deep benchmarking on the Vello side is that our performance story is far from done. We know one current issue is the use of device atomics for aggregating bounding boxes. We have a prototype implementation [2] that uses monoids for segmented reduction. Additionally, we plan to do f16 math (which should be a major win especially on mobile), as well as using subgroups for various prefix sum steps (subgroups are in the process of landing in WebGPU[3]).
Overall, I'm thrilled to see this released as open source, and that there's so much activity in fast GPU vector graphics rendering. I'd love to see a future in which CPU path rendering is seen as being behind the times, and this moves us closer to that future.
[1]: https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn/+/refs/heads/main/docs/da...
[2]: https://github.com/linebender/vello/issues/259
[3]: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/4306
- WebKit Switching to Skia for 2D Graphics Rendering
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Looking for this. html + css rendering through wgpu.
Dioxus is working on this with blitz. It's leveraging wgpu through the linebender group's Vello renderer. Still in early stages.
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A note on Metal shader converter
If you're doing advanced compute work (including lock-free data structures), then it's best effort.
https://github.com/linebender/vello/issues/42 is an issue from when Vello (then piet-gpu) had a single-pass prefix sum algorithm. Looking back, I'm fairly confident that it's a shader translation issue and that it wouldn't work with MoltenVK either, but we stopped investigating when we moved to a more robustly portable approach.
- Vello: An experimental WebGPU-based compute-centric 2D renderer in Rust
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XUL Layout has been removed from Firefox
There are a number of up-and-coming Rust-based frameworks in this niche:
- https://github.com/iced-rs/iced (probably the most usable today)
- https://github.com/vizia/vizia
- https://github.com/marc2332/freya
- https://github.com/linebender/xilem (currently very incomplete but exciting because it's from a team with a strong track record)
What is also exciting to me is that the Rust GUI ecosystem is in many cases building itself up with modular libraries. So while we have umpteen competing frameworks they are to a large degree all building and collaborating on the same foundations. For example, we have:
- https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit (cross-platform window creation)
- https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu (abstraction on top of vulkan/metal/dx12)
- https://github.com/linebender/vello (a canvas like imperative drawing API on top of wgpu)
- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (UI layout algorithms)
- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text rendering and editing)
- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit (cross-platform accessibility APIs)
In many cases there a see https://blessed.rs/crates#section-graphics-subsection-gui for a more complete list of frameworks and foundational libraries)
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Drawing and Annotation in Rust
blessed.rs lists these three crates for 2D drawing: - https://lib.rs/crates/femtovg - https://lib.rs/crates/skia-safe - https://github.com/linebender/vello
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Recommended UI framework to draw many 2D lines?
Vello (https://github.com/linebender/vello) which uses wgpu to render Edit: just saw you require images. Vello doesn't support those yet
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Announcing piet-glow, a GL-based implementation of Piet for 2D rendering
How does this relate to Vello? Both target raw-window-handle for winit compatibility. Vello uses WGPU vs piet-glow using GL.
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Is WGPU actually a good idea yet?
Finally, maybe vello could help you with ideas. It's not production ready yet, but they have some interesting ideas for 2D rendering using wgpu.
msdfgen
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Shader Park Is Kinda Neat
This very well explained here https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen and with more details in link d pdf.
Basically, signed distance fields allow high resolution renders from low resolution rasters which represent character shape.
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SDF font rendering & cuttoff parameter value
No idea how to help you but I will just drop this since it improved the quality for me by 1000 https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
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Best approach to render a lot of text.
And that's the complicated state of the art version for 3D perspective. Other versions are even simpler.
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Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
This is known as a “multi-channel signed distance field”, or “msdf”.
https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
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Font question: What software do you use to create "Signed Distance Field" from OTF or TTF?
I use this, free and has been very good for me https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
- MelonJS – a fresh and lightweight JavaScript game engine
- What is the maximum number of texture2D's I can have in a single texture array uniform binding?
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Why are SDF editors not more popular for creating assets?
Distance fields are not slow to render. They don't need a powerful gpu. Valve was already using SDF for textures in 2007 and released a paper about it. MSDF (multi channel signed distance fields) is a popular text libraries for game engine devs that uses distance fields. Distance fields are fast to render in 2D and even 3D. The problem is with everything around it. Lighting, shadows, shading will all require specialized tooling and likely a specialized engine for very little benefit (imo).
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Vector Graphics on GPU
Signed distance fields only work well for relatively simple characters.
If you have highly detailed characters like Chinese or emojis, you need larger resolution to faithfully represent every detail. One way to get around excessive memory requirements is to store the characters in their default vector forms and only render the required characters on demand, but then you might as well render them at the required pixel resolution and do away with the additional complexity of SDF rendering.
SDFs are still useful though if you have to render text at many different resolutions, for example on signs in computer games, as seen in the original paper https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...
In the past, SDFs also had problems with sharp corners, which has been solved in https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
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Adventures in Text Rendering: Kerning and Glyph Atlases
MSDFGen looks pretty sweet. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
What are some alternatives?
nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
msdf-atlas-gen - MSDF font atlas generator
Vrmac - Vrmac Graphics, a cross-platform graphics library for .NET. Supports 3D, 2D, and accelerated video playback. Works on Windows 10 and Raspberry Pi4.
8SSEDT - Tutorial about 8-points Signed Sequential Euclidean Distance Transform
troika - A JavaScript framework for interactive 3D and 2D visualizations
tinyraytracer - A brief computer graphics / rendering course
gpuweb - Where the GPU for the Web work happens!
msdfgl - OpenGL implementation of the MSDF algorithm
compute-shader-101 - Sample code for compute shader 101 training
harfbuzz - HarfBuzz text shaping engine