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Vectex: SVG Vector Texture Plugin for Blender

Virgilio Vasconcelos ·

Blender user Marcelo de Gomensoro Malheiros have just released the first version of his vector texture plugin: Vectex.Vectex

Not sure of what this is good for? Imagine that you have a bitmap logo applied to, say, that cool wine bottle you just finished. But now you had this great idea of making an animation where the camera zooms out from a particular detail of the logo until the whole bottle is framed.

Well… if you haven’t made an insanely huge bitmap for the logo, the results on that zooming won’t be as good as you though of. This is where this plugin could be very handy.

From the author:

Its main goal is to be a robust texture plugin for rendering text, signs and
any other type of vector art, without the need for an explicit conversion to a
bitmap image. Correctly used it can both give a better quality and use less
memory than a bitmap.

To have a clearer idea of how cool this can be, watch this little video on YouTube.

The main features of this plugin are:

  • SVG support for paths and basic shapes, using solid colors.
  • Makes possible to render an arbitrarily detailed texture, calculating only the needed parts of it (called tiles) in the best resolution for the final Blender output.
  • Uses the Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG) library for very fast and accurate rendering.
  • Tiles are cached and kept in memory as long as they are needed or the memory limit is reached. It is also possible to see how much memory it is using.
  • Tiles which are of solid color are stored efficiently as a single RGB, both reducing memory usage and increasing the performance.
  • Implements trilinear texturing (mipmapping and bilinear texture interpolation).
  • Can apply a color code to the texture for the identification of different detail levels.
  • It is possible to define the base color (paper color) as where the SVG illustrations is drawn onto.
  • Has a simple text entry for specifying the SVG file.
  • Multiple instances of the plugin can be run independently in parallel, with different textures and settings.

For more info you can read the BlenderArtists.org thread.

Thanks, Marcelo, for this very useful plugin!

Author Virgilio Vasconcelos
Brazilian animator who uses Blender since 2003. Professor of 3D (with Blender, of course) and Digital 2D animation at UFMG (Federal University, Minas Gerais' state), Brazil.Writer of Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook, from Packt Publishing.Has a MFA degree with a research involving tools for free character deformation in 3D and is now performing a PhD research on distributed creation of media and animation.
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