Show HN: A painting engine that lets you sculpt drawings (tech demo)

  • Posted 1 hour ago by jignb
  • 2 points
https://softedge-techdemo.jign.workers.dev/
This is a playable tech demo. All painting software (Photoshop, Krita, etc.) rasterize your strokes as you work. This means the stroke is frozen forever. You may use some tools like perspective warp or liquefy but they are quite limited. The Soft Edge engine instead keeps a record of your strokes as data and rasterization happens on the fly, on each frame, like in a game engine. This lets you sculpt any property of your stroke.

Right now you can paint the following targets: pressure (which makes the stroke thicker or thinner), colour, and its position (you can grab the stroke after it was drawn).

The UI is a shell written in React. The more interesting part is the renderer, it's coded in Rust and compiled to WASM and WebGPU. The performance is quite nice, and has room to improve even more. All input is routed through WASM so pointer events are really, really fast, stroke polling feels like a completely native app, there's no React sluggishness anywhere in the actual painting process. The brush overlays are also rendered in the GPU core so those are also smooth. Only the panels, sliders, etc. are React.

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