Why there's no Fill Tool (desc.)
This question pops up every few days. This animation is here to answer it because I'm getting tired of explaining why in comments. While technically anything's possible, here's why we won't get a fill tool on Drawn: Drawn is vector art. What this means is that when you draw I'm not recording filled-in pixels, but the instructions for how to draw the line you are creating. This allows me to scale (grow and shrink) the images cleanly and keeps the amount of data required to reproduce the image very small. A flood fill algorithm works on pixels... when you click on a pixel it looks for adjacent pixels of the same colour and changes it to the flood colour over and over until it hits an edge. It also requires additional coding to make sure that when the fill colour hits an edge there's a smooth transition (anti-aliasing) otherwise it will look very "choppy". This technique does not grow or shrink nicely because it's actual pixels instead of instructions of how to draw something. It also would be very slow to implement in JavaScript (which is what Drawn is written in). What would make more sense in Drawn would be the ability to draw arbitrary shapes and be able to change their fill colour and outline colour (similar to Adobe Flash/Animate). Then we could do fancy stuff like use gradients and tween colours over frames. I might include that in the next version of the editor. If anyone asks this again, just link to this animation. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away in the comments. #floodfill #fill #drawn
- Published October 25, 2018, 10:07
- in Kiddie Pool
- in Site Updates & Help
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