Diffusion Curves, a new Vector primitive

There are those Wizards that can make vectors look photo realistic, but it requires an incredible amount of work. The limitations of the vector drawing tools is the problem - you can only do linear or radial gradients. Diffusion Curves is a new technique demonstrated at Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs that looks really impressive and could change your perception of Vector artwork.

Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs is a website where Adobe publishes research and development papers for many of the things they are involved with. If you want to see new technology before it is incorporated into a tool, this is the part of the Adobe website to check out. From object tracking in video to advanced imaging techniques, there's articles, videos and technical papers describing the research and we just became aware of Diffusion Curves - a feature that might make it into the next version of Flash and/or Illustrator.

It's been a while since something new happened in Vector Drawing, but Diffusion Curves looks promising! By assigning colors to the various bezier points along a curve, it is possible to instantly achieve effects that would require a lot of work with current tools. Every point is assigned a color for each side of the vector curve. By blending the colors and curve, you'll get some really good looking vectors that can be used to recreate virtually any real world image. The image above is entirely drawn using vectors (maximize you browser window and click image to enlarge) and is a compilation of sample images created by this project.

The tool demonstrated can also do incredibly high quality tracing of images to produce photo realistic trace's of ordinary images. Check out the video below to see how Diffusion Curves work. Read more about this technique at Adobe's Advanced Technology Labs or the ARTIS Laboratoire LJK Project Page.

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