How to implement an eraser tool in a simple drawing app? - graphics

I have a prototype of a simple drawing application. When the user drags a finger across the screen, I record the points along the way and draw a series of lines between them. In other words, a drawing is a list of “paths” and each path is a list of points to connect. This is easy, it works and it’s efficient.
The problem is I’d like to implement an eraser tool. In a regular bitmap editor the eraser simply erases pixels, but in my drawing there are no pixels to erase – all pixels are created dynamically by stroking the paths. I could do a simple eraser by “drawing” using the background colour, overlaying the already painted paths. But I’d like to draw on a textured background, so that’s a no-go.
How would you do this? (Short of the obvious solution of representing the drawing as a bitmap where the eraser is simple.)

You can't implement an eraser in the traditional sense; what you describe with recording the paths and drawing them dynamically is vector graphics. The concept of an eraser comes from raster graphics (a bitmap, basically). With vector graphics, the user generally selects an item or an area of items to delete.
If you really wanted to do this, you'd basically have to do collision detection between all of the paths in your graphic and the rectangle (or whatever shape) of the eraser. When contact occurs, you'd have to cut the colliding graphic object on either side of the eraser by using the slope of the line(s) in contact with the eraser and the point of intersection.

You could probably find the intersections of your existing paths and the deleted area, split the existing paths up, and create new points at the intersections (which would become start/end points of the newly split paths).

I could do a simple eraser by
“drawing” using the background colour,
overlaying the already painted paths.
But I’d like to draw on a textured
background, so that’s a no-go.
Can't you do an "eraser by drawing" except you don't use a single color but the whole background as color. I mean, for a given path to erase, you take one by one each pixel and color it with the background color of the same pixel cordinates

Related

How to detect that a sprite has encountered a color in pygame

I want to detect that the sprite has encountered a color in pygame, which function should I use to achieve this function.
Though it is possible to get the color at any point in the surface that you want to check against using get_at() (docs here). You would need to find the new area that your sprite covered that it did not cover last time and check every pixel in that, and if other things were moving around you would have to check if your sprite now overlapped with any of those area and check that. Or you could decide that was too complicated and just run through every pixel under your sprites location (without you sprite drawn yet) and check for that color.
It is possible, but would likely not be very fast.
An alternative is if you know where those colors are you can mark those areas using rects, circles, sprites or masks (see here and here) that you can check against. That is usually much faster. These do not have to be drawn and so would be invisible. They would just be used to mark areas for the collision check.
If you do not know exactly where the colors are in the background or the other images, you can create masks based on the colors in them using pygame.mask.from_surface() or pygame.mask.from_threshold() (docs here and here).

Sprite Sheet Sprite Addition

So i have this spritesheet here:
And as seen on the left, you have to “add” the individual sprite parts, how do i do this?
I imagine there's a dedicated color (looks like pink) that should be treated not as a color but as transparency. So, you draw the first one without drawing any pixels that are pink (that is, leaving the background as is), then you draw the second one on top of it in a similar fashion, then the third and so on.

Is there an equivalent of soft pen in GDI+?

I need to draw a soft wide outline for my GDI+ GraphicsPath.
Something like this:
A path edge is shown in red. I'd like to use a wide pen which is smooth. I also need an ability to control smoothness of the pen.
I tried to use a gradient brush with the pen but couldn't find a solution that works.
I can achieve the desired result by drawing an outline with a black solid pen and applying a Gaussian smoothing filter on top of the result image, but I want to avoid this because it's slow when I have to process the whole image which could be quite large.
Is there a way to draw a smooth path outline?
There is no standard way in GDI+ that provides this functionality so you will have to create it.
You could track the line segments and draw a fuzzy, filled circle along the segments. By drawling the fuzzy circle once to a bitmap it should be fairly easy and fast to blit it continuously. By blending it slowly over time to the canvas you can also create a very nice effect and it would allow the user to control the intensity and maybe the size of the circle.

libgdx - how to change the color of a pixel in a TiledMapTile?

I succeeded in retrieving the exact tile my player is on, at runtime when walking around the tiledmap. I'd like now to add some alpha marks on the terrain when passing over, and to do that I need to modify the color of some pixels of the tile.
I really don't know how to do it right now.. any hints?
thanks.
You probably want to draw decorations on top of the tiles, rather than modifying the tiles themselves. The tile images are shared across all cells using a tile, so if you modify the tile itself you would see the change everywhere it was used. Further, modifying the texture is a relatively expensive operation that you probably should try to avoid.
To draw on top the tiles, you might draw additional sprites, or use a custom shader.

Direct3D: Wireframe without Diagonals

When using wireframe fill mode in Direct3D, all rectangular faces display a diagonal running across due to the face being split in to two triangles. How do I eliminate this line? I also want to remove hidden surfaces. Wireframe mode doesn't do this.
I need to display a Direct3D model in isometric wireframe view. The rendered scene must display the boundaries of the model's faces but must exclude the diagonals.
Getting rid of the diagonals is tricky as the hardware is likely to only draw triangles and it would be difficult to determine which edge is the diagonal. Alternatively, you could apply a wireframe texture (or a shader that generates a suitable texture). That would solve the hidden line issues, but would look odd as the thickness of the lines would be dependant on z distance.
Using line primitives is not trivial, although surfaces facing away from the camera can be easily removed, partially obscured surfaces would require manual clipping. As a final thought, do a two pass approach - the first pass draws the filled polygons but only drawing to the z buffer, then draw the lines over the top with suitable z bias. That would handle the partially obscured surface problem.
The built-in wireframe mode renders edges of the primitives. As in D3D the primitives are triangles (or lines, or points - but not arbitrary polygons), that means the built-in way won't cut it.
I guess you have to look up some sort of "edge detection" algorithms. These could operate in image space, where you render the model into a texture, assigning unique color for each logical polygon, and then do a postprocessing pass using pixel shader and detect any changes in color (color changes = output black, otherwise output something else).
Alternatively, you could construct a line list that only has the edges you need and just render them.
Yet another alternative could be using geometry shaders in Direct3D 10. Somehow, lots of different options here.
I think you'll need to draw those line manually, as wireframe mode is a built in mode, so I don't think you can modify that. You can get the list of vertex in your mesh, and process them into a list of lines that you need to draw.

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