D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer

Instantly render perfectly blended multi-color vector graphics using D-Type’s revolutionary direct color rasterizer.

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D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer is an advanced rasterizer that ships with the standard suite of D-Type libraries. Unlike D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer, which is designed to render one grayscale (or single color) outline description at a time, D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer can generate an entire multi-color RGBA scene during the rasterization process. Best of all, this is accomplished in a single rasterization pass! This unique feature enables D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer to render high-quality, scalable, anti-aliased graphics with perfect stitching between adjacent fill areas of different colors, and do so exceptionally fast.

With D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer, color and transparency are essential components of the rasterization process. Applications only need to assign different RGBA values to different contours during the scene construction phase. Coloring and pixel stitching are then performed automatically by D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer. We say that the color is directly applied, which is why this rasterizer is known as D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer.

In contrast, D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer is unaware of the final color that will be applied to the pixels; coloring and pixel stitching are not performed during the rasterization process but rather at display time, when rasterized pixels are alpha-blended into the background.

To better illustrate the difference between the perfect stitching offered by D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer and the standard stitching offered by D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer, compare the following two images:

Both images were generated by rasterizing the same vector art. However, the image generated by D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer (FIG-1A) looks better than the image generated by D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer (FIG-1B). This is because D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer features perfect stitching between adjacent fill areas of different colors.

Features

• Perfect stitching between adjacent fill areas of different colors
• Correctly computed colors even when fill areas overlap NEW
• Outstanding rendering quality
• Ultra-fast rendering — can utilize multiple worker threads to render concurrently
• Always sharp and smooth edges
• Extremely simple set of instructions
• Transparency
• Coordinates can be specified as whole pixels, float or fixed (fractional) values
• Supports both the Odd-Even and Nonzero Winding Number rules
• Renders extremely large multi-color RGBA scenes without difficulties
• Excellent dropout prevention
• When rendering only a single-color scene at a time, the generated output is exactly the same as with D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer
• Low hardware requirements
• Highly configurable

Key Specifications

Examples

Perfect Pixel Stitching

The following magnified images more clearly illustrate the difference between the perfect pixel stitching offered by D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer and the standard (alpha blended) pixel stitching offered by D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer. This difference is only noticeable when the contour edges are adjacent or extremely close to each other (i.e. less than 1 pixel). When the edges are spaced further apart (i.e. more than 1 pixel) or when they overlap, both D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer and D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer produce the same result.

Vectorized Photos And Illustrations

D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer excels at rendering vectorized photos and illustrations, which typically contain hundreds or thousands of adjacent contour edges. For example, images converted to vector art using popular bitmap-to-vector conversion programs, such as Vector Magic, look absolutely stunning when rendered using D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer. To our knowledge no other scalable rendering library on the market — whether implemented in hardware or software — can match D-Type’s rendering quality while remaining so efficient and simple to use. To give you a better idea of this quality, we have prepared a set of vectorized photos using the SVG files from the Vectorizing Photos page on the Vector Magic web site.

Vectorized Photo #1: Gulls In Silhouette — Open the SVG file to see how your web browser renders this image. Most likely, the result will be similar to the illustration shown in FIG-3B. The result you get with D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer is shown in FIG-3A.

Vectorized Photo #2: Sandhill Cranes In Flight — Open the SVG file to see how your web browser renders this image. Most likely, the result will be similar to the illustration shown in FIG-4B. The result you get with D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer is shown in FIG-4A.

Vectorized Photo #3: Rodin Sculpture — Open the SVG file to see how your web browser renders this image. Most likely, the result will be similar to the illustration shown in FIG-5B. The result you get with D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer is shown in FIG-5A.

Vectorized Photo #4: Sunset — Open the SVG file to see how your web browser renders this image. Most likely, the result will be similar to the illustration shown in FIG-6B. The result you get with D-Type Direct Color Rasterizer is shown in FIG-6A.