Composite's Vector Paint tool can be used to draw, to rotoscope, to clone parts of an image in a different location, or to reveal a completely different image.
In the Vector Paint tool, you draw by creating shapes on the canvas. Contrary to Composite's Raster Paint, once a shape is created in Vector Paint, you can edit its parameters to change the shape's location and orientation, for example using a tracker to animate the shape. If the shape is a Bézier, you can edit individual points, changing their opacity or their tangents, for example. You can do this using the same key frame animation techniques you use in other Composite tools. All the shapes drawn in a given Vector Paint tool are composited back to front over an optional background image to produce the Vector Paint output image.
Additionally, Vector Paint has strong similarities with other Composite shape-based tools, such as the Garbage Mask, Remove Dust, and Warp 2D tools.
The Vector Paint UI is composed of five tabs: the main (Vector Paint) tab, the Transform tab, the Brush tab, the Output tab, and the Settings tab. Each tab has two panes, with a divider between them that can be used to adjust the relative size of the two panes.
The left pane, the shape and tools pane, is identical in all five tabs. It is composed of the shape browser on the left, and on the right, a column with shape creation and editing tools, Bézier creation controls,and pen pressure controls.
All controls in the Vector Paint UI feature tool tips to provide information about their use.
Vector Paint uses the normal Composite high performance computation engine when rendering images used by the nodes connected to its output (downstream nodes). This provides the best overall performance and throughput, but can introduce noticeable lag (or latency) when drawing shapes in a player.
For this reason, in player Tool Output display mode, Vector Paint uses a low-latency renderer that ensures all interactions are fluid and images are produced with minimal lag.
You can use this to your advantage depending on the type of interaction you need. For example, if you need maximal performance and are not creating strokes interactively, you can connect a Pass-Through tool node to Vector Paint's output and set a context point on the Pass Through, to view Vector Paint's output. When rendering large numbers of strokes on large images, this will produce the highest throughput. The quality and pixel accuracy of both rendering methods is identical.
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