New version very buggy; went back to the one from last November.

go here for 1 million digits of pi
http://www.piday.org/million.php

Hello,

Author of the stippling tool here. I've been trolling these forums keeping track of the interesting things people do with the tool (the circlism stuff was pretty darn neat!) and getting some motiviation for use cases. Whenever lylejk makes a post that links to the tool, traffic spikes to my web-site so that is always nice If you are having problems, do let me know through e-mail (sahab DOT yazdani AT gmail DOT com) or log a defect in the defect tracker on GitHub (https://github.com/thegrandpoobah/voron ... state=open). Or I guess right on this forum will work too. I will try to help out as best as I can.

As for the new version (the one from March), it is supposed to be much much faster than any of the previous ones thanks to optimizations and usage of multiple CPU cores (CPUs circa 2007+ roughly). It also works natively under Linux now thanks to some help from a fellow developer. Again, if you are having problems, do let me know

Regards,
Sahab Yazdani

Cool Sahab; very much enjoy your gift and glad that you shared it with us. Yeah, I get this crash on a test image that I used with the current release (and not all images crash mind you). Also seems much slower then the release that I downloaded this past November (though on that image it does work; not showing the result). Event viewer didn't flag anything either so the error just remains vague unfortunately.

Below's my batch file that I do a drag and drop from a shortcut that's on my desktop:



Below is the crash; no description (trust me I waited long enough and just stopped the wait):



I used Adrian's plant4h.png and it crashes every time (even my other batch file which uses 5000 stipples instead of 500 but identical to the batch file posted otherwise). Not sure if it will crash for you. It's a greyscale image; I even tried to convert it to rgb but it still crashes.

Link to Adrian's test images: http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~ajsecord/npar20 ... ginals.zip

Below's the result from the program voronoi-20110926.zip (which I downloaded actually last November when I noticed that you updated it (not that good but wanted to use the same parameters as the batch):

I've filed this as Issue #18: (https://github.com/thegrandpoobah/voronoi/issues/18) and will take a look sometime soon-ish.

It may be related to Issue #17 (https://github.com/thegrandpoobah/voronoi/issues/17), which I have a potential fix for that I am testing.

(For future consideration, if you use the -l (logging) option, it sometimes gives more insight into where/why it crashed, but I don't think that in this particular case it makes any difference.

I will let you know.

That's cool Sahab. Again, thanks.

Hey guys is there anyway some one could pass me any necessary .dll's and such? Like the VCOMP100.dll? I am trying to create a portable version of this as it might be cool to take around on my thumbdrive (and looking at the license files, it seems alright to do so as well)

I acually installed Visual C++ libraries per the link at Sahab's site Zward117 and there's no telling what other libraries this routine requires. You could go to dll-files.com (used them in the past; good resource) but I wouldn't do it this way, but if you are game, it's a possibility.

I know I just don't want to have to have users install that if they want to use it port-ably (I guess that would be how you would spell that word?{at least according to chrome and firefox lol}), but thanks for that link will look into it tonight.
EDIT:
Didn't work....darn! Got the error to go away but now it just's flashes and doesn't run. Oh well.

I was able to reproduce the problem and I think I have a fix. Please try out this version which contains the fix: http://www.saliences.com/downloads/stip ... t-beta.zip
and let me know if it works out.

As for the speed issues, although the tool may be slower by default on smaller number of stipples, it now scales much better than before. For example, on my own laptop it would have been basically impossible to generate images with 10,000+ stipples in the past, but now I can comfortably do images with 100,000+ stipples and/or lower (more accurate) threshold settings.

For smaller number of stipples (or gigantic images), you can make the tool faster without sacrificing quality by decreasing the sub-pixel density setting (-p 1 is a good start).

All of this should *really* be documented, but alas, who has the patience

The reason you have to have the C++ library from Microsoft is to support multi-cpu stippling. Unfortunately, the Microsoft compiler doesn't let you integrate that file straight into your executable. Unfortunately, I think it is pretty difficult to include the necessary files with the program (it is certainly possible because some PortableApps applications depend on these dlls as well).

One way of achieving zWard117's goal might be to compile the program using GCC and recent work has enabled this (the reason why it works under linux now), but I personally do not want to switch compilers/maintain two versions. If somebody else would be willing to do it though...

Hope that helps,

Yup that fixed it at least for the sample mentioned. You sure are right when it comes to high count stipples; near instantaneous. I could always use the old version for small stipple counts (like using this cool tool for creating marbles; lots of help from Inkscape to do this) and new one for larger cound stipples (though it does take a few more seconds to open a 50K stipple in GIMP); I'm flexable. lol

Thanks a heap again. Miss the previewer as a pacifier, but again, I can live without it.

Well, I was going to ask how hard it would be to create a tool like Perculator, but it could be proprietary. lol

Here's something I like creating witha 10K count stipple; even better with a 50K count stipple. lol

G'MIC Gradient Norm ran on the stippld output gives you this plant cells effect.

OK; not so tired now and re-read your comments. Definitely for small count stipples, lower the value of the -p switch (default 5; I lowered to 2) speed things up dramatically. Now I feel comfortable with changing out my desktop batch files with your new program Sahab (I know you said 1 which would indeed probably be faster, but 2 is good too at least for 5000 count stipple).

For the curious, below's what I use now as my batch file; just save and create a shortcut on your desktop then you can do drag and drop which will save the svg file where you initiated the drag and drop.

lol, it's a reptile plant!

Excellent Lyle.Here is one i ran with 30,000 dots.



It took longer to load in Inkscape than to create it.
3 seconds in Voronoi.

Just don't have too much fun with it Rod; you need to sleep. lol

Sahib's fix is a keeper that is for sure. Glad he gave Adrian Secorde's algorithms new life since Secorde decided not to update (indeed he removed all evidence) his Imagemagick code since Imagemagick changed a few instruction sets apparently; like Sahib's code better anyway.

I like this stippling thingy, but as embarrassing as it may be to expose my ignorance, I don't have a clue what you guys are talking about with all this tech jargon. Could someone provide a step by step procedure for installing everything I need to make this work for Windows XP-SP3? Rod, You're running the same system as me and it seems to work for you. Perhaps you could break this down into a Readers Digest version so goofs like me can understand it. What the heck is a C++ library anyway? Where does it go, etc., etc.

I only use XP for browsing Drac so maybe Rod can help you. I believe you have to have Visual Basic C⁺⁺ DLL files installed on your computer though per the site instructions. Also, you can use the batch file that I explained earlier and then create a short-cut to it on your desktop so you can then drag PNG (only PNG) files onto the shortcut to create the resulting SVG file.