In my last post I talked about the new vector engine in C2 which was designed for easier drawing of smooth shapes and curves. It was less suited for drawing arbitrary, organic curves. I said was, because the vector engine of C2 has grown a lot since then. First thing – Comicado splines are now also a part of the engine. They have been reworked and expanded but their “mathematical behavior” remain the same. They are no longer called splines; a new tool for creating them is “vector pen” (or just pen) so I call them just “vector pen curves”. This pen tool works like raster brushes and you can utilize tablet pressure sensitivity for line width. The other kind of curves (the “smooth” one) are called “polyline curves”. If somebody has a better idea for names I can revisit terminology (it is really hard to think out the most appropriate names).

With addition of vector pen, C2 now features two different types of vector curves. This is something I tried to avoid at first. I tried to extend capabilities of  the “polyline curves” to work with vector pen, but wasn’t happy with the results and some operations become mathematically too complicated for my head. I eventually gave up and resort to splines from Comicado which are mathematically more flexible for intended use. Two different types of vector curves adds to complexity, but also provide possibility of choosing the better tool for a task. The entire vector engine is, compared to Comicado’s one, more complex simply because it is a lot bigger. It consist of many tools, sub-tools and options for creating and editing vector curves in various ways. I tried the best to keep everything coherent and most of the features are pretty obvious. I think most users will quickly grasp how things work with a bit of playing around.

Here is a picture of some air traffic drawn with vector tools:

The plane was drawn with polyline tool. The magnificent Superpig was drawn with pen. The flying saucer is drawn with polyline and the guy inside with vector pen.

The vector drawing capabilities of C2 has still a lot of place to grow. It is quite interesting – the more functions you add the more ideas you get. Still I think I am done with it for now. There are a lot of other stuff in C2 which need to still be addressed. In the next few months I want to bring C2 to a state when it become ready for more serious usage.