Flow Field Editor Still Alive

I’ve come up with some new ideas for what seemed a completed tool. This release of FFE (“Flow Field” Editor) has changed significantly, so I will describe it from scratch.

Introduction
What FFE now produces is in general an image. It can be created from: flow field points, color points, color gradients following Bezier curves (middle-click at endpoints to adjust colors) or a combination of these.

First, Bezier curves with adjustable width (middle-click at the control points) are drawn on an initially empty and transparent canvas.

Flow field points are mapped to color points depending on their direction+magnitude (RGB, use handles to manipulate) and wave size (A, middle-click at one of flow field point handles to edit).

Color points are defined directly using RGB and A components (middle-click to edit).

The space between color points is then interpolated using either linear, cubic or natural neighbor interpolation.

In linear interpolation mode, color points can be marked as “passive” meaning that one of non-passive points in the triangulation will replace the color of the passive point. To flip point’s passiveness Shift + right-click on it or use the Mark Passive tool.

To delete any object, right-click on the movable part of it (e.g., flow point’s handles, Bezier curve’s endpoints).

There are 9 tools now in FFE:
– Flow points (add flow points)
– Gradient points (add color points)
– Flow brush (adjust direction/magnitude of flow points using a brush)
– Gradient adjust (adjust individual color points using absolute or relative color changes with optional cloning)
– Eraser (remove flow and color points using a brush)
– Gradient brush (change color of multiple color points using a brush)
– Mark passive (set, unset or flip passiveness of multiple color points using a brush)
– Add Bezier curve (as the name says 😉 )
– Add Bezier point (add new segment to the current Bezier curve; the current Bezier curve is the last created or edited one).

Some of the tools have configurable options displayed in a panel below tool selection combo box.

You can right-click in the free space of your design to undock the tools menu and display it under your mouse cursor. It’s a convenience feature to minimize moving your mouse back and forth. Double-clicking the title bar of such undocked menu sends it back to the docking space. You can also close it and use right-click again to reopen it.

The New/Save/Load/Export entries in File menu remained mostly the same except for the “Generate flow grid” and “Generate gradient grid” in the “New” submenu. As the names suggest they generate an MxN flow or gradient grid respectively. In addition to number of rows/columns, for flow grid – the direction (in %) and wave size (0-255) have to be specified, for gradient grid – the color.

Behind-the-scenes Changes:
– Natural neighbor interpolation is now based on nn-c library which is significantly faster than my own implementation from previous releases.
– FFE no longer uses OpenGL for linear interpolation. It is software-based now for both preview and output. A little bit slower but more predictable.

Licensing Changes:
Previously FlowEd was published without any specific license. It’s time to change that. Eventually I’m aiming for a commercial open-source model but for now I’m publishing just the binaries under a free-of-charge EULA license. It’s nothing too restrictive, just trying to prevent others from making what I consider unfair profit on my Software. Output of this software is not subject to ANY restrictions, so you can relax and use it in your productions.

A couple of new effects are possible with this new functionality. I will describe at least one of them in the coming posts. In the meantime, feel free to unleash your own creativity using this new tool 🙂 Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD: flowed.zip