How can I get rid of banding in JavaFX gradients? - javafx

I'm using the GraphicsContext of a JavaFX Canvas to draw gradients (linear as well as radial), some times using the alpha channel to layer gradients on top of each other. But since the color resolution is so low (8 bits per channel), I have very obvious and annoying banding artifacts on each and every one of the gradients, for instance as shown in the image below.
I would like to increase the color resolution so that the banding disappears. If that is not possible, I would be eager to know if there are different Java-compatible APIs/frameworks for creating 2D drawings - I don't need UI stuff, I just want to draw, display, and save images.
Thanks in advance for any useful advice!

Related

2D Grease Pencil layer problem and render issue

Hi guys I have 2 major queries that are stumping me.
I am very new and fresh to blender so reply with that in mind please.
I am currently drawing a 2D character and every time I try to draw on a new layer on the G Pencil stroke layer blender restarts. To work around this Ive added a second g pencil and now I can continue drawing without blender restarting. But now Im unsure of how to place the the layer in front or behind. If i change the plane of the stroke and bring it forward sometimes the drawing glitches out. Changing the hierarchy of the strokes does nothing. What am I missing here. the first stroke does have 100s of layers.
Secondly I am trying to draw a landscape in 2D in a Ghlibi art style. Which to do that Im using the g pencil and changed some of the stroke attributes to say layer the grass for texture in the landscape. Then I reached a point where the stroke would no longer render for me to view what I was doing. Im assuming theres too much detail for my cpu to process Is there a way to flatten the drawing I have done soo far so its easier to render rather than it being an active layer. This is something that you can do in photoshop effortlessly when painting with a brush so maybe Im using the wrong method. Please advise?
Thanking anyone that can help in advance
Im expecting to be able continue the the character whilst being able to select layers at the front or back.
Im expecting to be able to continue drawing the landscape without losing the rendered look so I can see what im drawing.

QPainter drawImage becomes very pixelated

I use QPainter and the function drawImage to draw an airplane on a map. The image and redrawn each time the position of the airplane changes. The problem is, after some time, the image becomes extremely pixelated. I have tried to use a high quality .svg and that did not help either.
Below is my code. Can somebody spot where the error is or what has caused the image to be so pixelated?
// Load .svg image
airplane->load("AirplaneTopDown.svg");
// Downsize image
airplaneSmall = airplane->scaled(120, 120,Qt::KeepAspectRatio);
// Rotate image by trans
airplaneSmall = airplaneSmall.transformed(trans);
// Draw image and center at a certain screen position
painter.drawImage(airplaneX-airplaneSmall.width()/2,airplaneY-airplaneSmall.height()/2,airplaneSmall);
Below are the images of the drawn airplanes. One taken as screenshot at the beginning of the program runtime another one taken after a couple of minutes.
Airplane
Airplane-pixelated
One of your problems is that you first rescale the image and then rotate it.
The rotation needs to interpolate new pixels from the old ones. The higher the resolution of the input, the better the quality of the interpolation. The quality of your SVG is completely lost after the rescale operation.
The second problem you are facing is that you use the "fast" (default) transformation method. This method does not antialias. So instead of interpolating from several input pixels, it will only take one best fit. Calling transformed() with the second argument Qt::SmoothTransformation and scaled() with the sceond argument Qt::SmoothTransformation |Qt::KeepAspectRatio` will greatly improve your results.
However it is also slower, as is performing the rotation on the image in its original, higher resolution.
The arguably best solution to your problem is to take on a different approach. Instead of loading the SVG into a QImage, which is a raster-based image, you should work with the vector graphics. So the SVG is rendered in the right orientation and scale in the first place. A good starting point is the SVG Viewer Example: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtsvg-svgviewer-example.html

How to increase click radius in bokeh?

I'm doing some simple plotting and would like to increase the usability of my figure.
I have quite a lot of points on my graph and have issues with selecting the ones I want because the click radius is so tiny.
I can increase the circle radius of my point but the radius of the area which displays a tooltip is still only 1 dot. Can I increase the radius somehow without having to create additional points around which respond the same?
Would it be even possible to increase the click detection radius without increasing the actual circle radius?
in the current version (0.8.2) and in the upcoming version (0.9) this is not yet a tunable parameter. It would be a good feature to expose a click radius, so I have made an issue on our issue tracker, that you can follow, here:
https://github.com/bokeh/bokeh/issues/2230
In the short term, a possible workaround is to have a second, invisible set of glyphs that are used for hit testing. They would be at the same locations, but bigger, to provide a bigger hit area.

how to draw filled polygon in Google Maps SDK for iOS

I would like draw a filled polygon on iPhone with Google map (Version 1.1.1, the last one).
Anyone knows how to do like that on ios :
(My code on Android)
mMap.addPolygon(new PolygonOptions()
.addAll(latLngList)
.fillColor(Color.BLUE)
.strokeColor(Color.RED)
.strokeWidth(3));
Regards,
PS : If you have many solutions, keep in mind that I have many Polygon to draw.
The SDK currently doesn't support filled polygons, however there is a feature request to add them here:
https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=5070
In the meantime, one option could be to draw your polygons into an image, and then add them as a ground overlay. This would be very limiting, but might work as a temporary workaround.
Another option is to add another view over the top of the map view and draw the polygons into it, and then update them whenever the map view moves. It isn't possible to perfectly synchronize another view with the map view, so your polygons will lag behind a bit as you pan/zoom around, but this might also be okay for you as a temporary workaround.
UPDATE
These are just some random ideas to try for the ground overlay approach, I'm not sure if they would work, but they might get you started:
I would suggest converting the lat/lon corners of the rectangle into MKMapPoint (using MKMapPointForCoordinate). These are equivalent to Google's coordinate system at zoom level 20.
You can then use the aspect ratio of the width/height of the rectangle in MKMapPoint coordinates to determine the aspect ratio of your ground overlay UIImage. Once you have the aspect ratio, you'll just need to experiment with actual sizes (ie guess a width, calculate the height from the aspect ratio) to find one which looks okay. The bigger it is, the finer the detail of your rectangle will be, but the more memory it will use, and probably the slower the performance will be. Also you might hit a hard limit at some size - I'm guessing the UIImage gets converted by the Google Maps SDK into a texture, and textures have a max size of 2048x2048 on iPhone 3GS+.
Then, use something similar to How to setRegion with google maps sdk for iOS? to calculate a zoom level and centre lat/lon. Instead of the map view width/height you would use your UIImage width/height, and you'd use the bounds of your rectangle instead of the bounds of the desired view. You also wouldn't need to calculate the scale from both the width and height (as the scale should be the same) - so just use one of them. Instead of creating a camera with the zoom level and centre lat/lon, set them on the GMSGroundOverlayOptions. Also set the ground overlay's anchor to the centre of the image (ie 0.5, 0.5).
The above describes how to add one GroundOverlay per rectangle. If you have lots of overlapping or nearby rectangles you could probably combine them into a single UIImage, but that would be a bit more complicated.

Drawing shapes in Flex / Actionscript

I want to develop an image editing application in Flex 4. My initial requirement is to draw various shapes like Line, Rectablge, Triangle, Circle, Star etc in appication. I want to facilitate user to draw shapes using rubber banding like professional applications do.
All shapes would be vector and should look smooth in an size. So, can't use bitmap and scale them.
What are better methods to achieve this?
if you don't want to start from scratch with the basic shapes, there is this framework called degrafa: http://www.degrafa.org/
they have plenty of parametric shapes & curves and advanced features to organize them together.
Make shape editor with some control points. Control points are draggable sprites (circles or squares as you like). When control point is moved, editor must be updated - it may be resize or move action. On resize, draw your vector shape according to new size. The easiest way to make sprite draggable is startDrag() function - you can also set limits there (to stay in editor area or to disable negative sizes).
I have done such editors based on Sprites, added into Flex application with rawChildren.addChild, but you can try to use Canvases instead of Sprites if you wish.

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