One-line drawings

150 points by qrv3w 4 years ago | 22 comments

dunkmaster 4 years ago |

This one-line AI could be of interest: https://clipasso.github.io/clipasso/

qrv3w 4 years ago | |

Brilliant! Thanks for that link. I'm definitely going to incorporate that.

Gualdrapo 4 years ago |

Didn't know about autotrace. I was supposing it would just trace the bitmap into a compound path, sort of what like potrace does, but the animation suggests it traces into a single path - which is absolutely great, as afterwards you can adjust the stroke width, linecaps and more thingies. Amazing!

qrv3w 4 years ago | |

Yeah potrace can do the same thing - trace a path of a bitmap. (Imagemagick can too). In my tests (with lots of line drawings) I felt autotrace generally had better results. Wish I kept the side-by-side comparisons to show...

sam1r 4 years ago |

This is awesome. For some reason when I'm on Chrome, I can't see the animated gif the article references. Which is the most interesting part.

It works on Safari. But here's a direct link that works on chrome. https://schollz.com/img/oneline/person.webm

woolion 4 years ago |

Cool project, very inspiring!

I'm wondering if this could be used to generate drawings using line weight by using a brush tip and adjusting the Z coordinates. The "dessins abrégés" (abridged drawings) are a great historical antecedant by master artist Keisai would be a perfect match for this.

qrv3w 4 years ago | |

That's a great idea! I think you're absolutely right - in the video of the plotter I used a pen that has a more flexible nib and pressing it down (especially at an angle) will add more line weight. I'll have to encode the line width along the line now :)

woolion 4 years ago | | |

There is a Posca with a brush tip and good ink flow. The easiest to find is the Pentel, but does not flow that fast so you'd have to adjust the speed. So it might not be that easy, and require some experimentation...

rwoerz 4 years ago |

Reminds me of Fourier Series [1] although this just works for closed curves AFAIK.

[1] https://youtu.be/r6sGWTCMz2k

jacobolus 4 years ago | |

For an “open curve” (parametric function from a segment) the analogous tool is the Chebyshev series.

https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/ATAP/ATAPfirst6chapt...

huachimingo 4 years ago |

This reminds me somehow of Haiku/senryu poems: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku

jstanley 4 years ago |

Cool project, nice work. FWIW, Inkscape has an extension called "Gcodetools" which can turn SVG paths into Gcode for you. But I totally get the desire to do it for yourself.

letitbeirie 4 years ago |

And here I was expecting to see how the power station is wired.

https://www.piping-designer.com/images/disciplines/electrica...

gilleain 4 years ago |

I was trying to do a similar-ish thing. Autotools looks useful. Parsing the SVG path was a bit of a nightmare.

For traversing the path, I considered the Chinese postman problem. There might be easier ways.

pihentagy 4 years ago |

That one reminded me about inkscape and the path simplify feature (not specific to one line drawings, but that was a loose association seeing the animated drawings)

SnowHill9902 4 years ago |

If that’s a line the canvas is very non Euclidean.

gumby 4 years ago |

This would be a great way to build those videos that draw a picture. Currently done by hand.

yodon 4 years ago | |

You might find excalidraw-animate[0] easier for that.

[0]https://github.com/dai-shi/excalidraw-animate

gumby 4 years ago | | |

Thanks.

MathMonkeyMan 4 years ago |

What is that tweet even saying?

Markoff 4 years ago |

One line drawings? Open the website and very first picture is multiple lines, same goes at least for dove and didn't study others. False advertising.

jml7c5 4 years ago | |

Ctrl+F: "sometimes"