Brush spacing / rotate / scale

[Sven Langkamp]

On 11/15/07, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
> > There was a vector app on SGIs that had insanely detailed parametric
> > brushes (all vectors). Some of them had infinite level of detail.
> > Everything was kept vectors until it got rendered into a bitmap at some
> > point. You could zoom into brushes and they would have more and more
> > detail. I have to dig the web a little bit, maybe I can recall its name
> and
> > find some screenshots. This was in 1997. 10 years later I haven't seen
> > anything like it... :)
>
> The thing is... Why? There must be a reason that concept failed. I have read
> in some old Computer Arts magazines Thomas Zander gave me about an
> application that freely mixed any kind of pixel-producing art, from raster
> to
> vector to video, around 1995. The reviewers complained that it was
> incredibly
> slow, buggy as hell and that the user interface was very confusing. But that
> app still didn't have the kind of node-brushes you describe.

Maybe the reason why the concept failed is that SGI wasn't doing much
graphics stuff anymore. In 1995 the computers were not powerful enough
to make such applications interesting (except on SGI workstations)
Fancy effects like live-updates need faster computers and/or hardware
acceleration.