- title
- Ploma Rendering Experiments
- dated
- April 2023
Plan of Attack:
Prototype a few uses of dynamic ink using Dan Amelang and Evelyn Eastmond’s Ploma as the renderer.
Questions:
- Does it look good?
- Is Ploma performant enough for us?
- … when writing / sketching
- … when we animate strokes programmatically
- How difficult is it to extend what’s already there?
Deliverable:
- A simple inking prototype (works like a sheet of paper)
- An extension of the prototype where some strokes are animated
Results
Research notes:
One of the things I ended up prototyping was a recognizer for “blobs” and “wires.” There are lots of visual languages we could build from these objects and their relationships—e.g., a wire that has one of its ends inside a blob is an input to that blob, while a wire that has one of its ends just outside a blob is an output of that blob. I’m interested in exploring this sort of thing further.
Demo:
Simple inking experience:
Animated strokes:
Recognizing blobs and wires:
Findings:
- Ploma was supposed to be a faithful rendering of a BIC pen on Moleskine notebook, and they really nailed it. The strokes look very realistic and it was satisfying to see something that nice and natural-looking on my iPad. It was a very different experience compared to the Apple Notes app.
- The performance of the inking was fine when drawing and taking notes.
- …but not so good when I tried animating strokes. This is because the only way to modify any of the existing strokes is to redraw the entire “scene” from scratch. (This is just how the Ploma library works.)