Sketch Board

My first attempt at drawing on a computer was a grainy landscape created with the spray brush tool in Microsoft Paint. It was an unfortunate time in my life, but I'm feeling better now. Anyhow, most paint apps simply connect dots drawn by your mouse. Often, they'll offer exotic widths and opacities in the way they connect them, but this is a far cry from a real brush. To model a brush, I've created an digital aggregate of damped bristles that vary in size and number. Additionally, I've added some randomness that can emulate the random hatchings caused by scribbling repeatedly over a line. This should all appear in a drawing app below. The brush controls will appear in a separate window, so you may need to adjust your popup blocker.

Blender Integration

My ulterior motive for creating the brush was modeling stick figures for billboards in Blender. While fun, the post processing was a little tedious. First, the image alpha would need to be extracted and saved in a separate file that would have to be mapped onto a plane and scaled appropriately. This gets repetitive after a while, so I created a python script that automates the entire process. The two links below show it in action. The small one simply demonstrates the script, whereas the longer one shows the entire process of making the image at the head of the page. I recommend the longer one because it has significantly more sheep.

Header Creation Video (Flash - 5.2MB)
Brief sketchBoard Video (Flash - 1.5MB)

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Scrawble created 17 Sep 08

An infinite chalkboard