I've made some good progress on the new Wrinkle-Free gradient engine for Omber. There's still a lot more work to do, and it will take several months to stabilize it and to get rid of all the bugs. The results are so good, though, that I've decided to release a preview of the Wrinkle-Free engine in the latest version of Omber. The new engine can be enabled from the Options menu.

I'm a little embarrassed to say that I've always been a little unhappy with the images created in Omber. Although Omber was still a great improvement over other vector drawing tools, I've always been reluctant to evangelize it really hard. Every time I looked at images rendered in the old engine, all I could see were the minor visual artifacts at the seams between shapes. But no more! With the new Wrinkle-Free engine, those artifacts are gone, and I can whole-heartedly say that Omber is amazing and that everyone should use it.

Below is one of the old clipart images in Omber. By default, the shape segments in the drawing are not welded together. The Wrinkle-Free engine only comes into play for welded segments, so, by default, the drawing will be rendered with the old engine. The dog on the left is rendered with the old engine. There are subtle visual artifacts in the image that I've circled in red on the center dog. If you look in those places on the left dog, you'll see some strange lines or creases in the rendered image. In the right dog, I've welded the shapes together where the visual artifacts occurred. This allows the Wrinkle-Free engine to do its job. If you look in the same problem areas, you won't see any of those line artifacts. They've been all smoothed out by the Wrinkle-Free engine.


I'll be taking a small break from the Wrinkle-Free engine and working on other aspects of Omber for the next month. I may have to finally figure out how to get people to actually use Omber and how to monetize it.