How it Works

This ain't your mama's image filter!

Provide a photo.

Pick a shape.

Watch Primitive make art.

The user provides an image as input. The program tries to find the most optimal shape that can be drawn to maximize the similarity between the target image and the drawn image. It repeats this process, adding one shape at a time.

Using this process, the program can recreate a photo with surprisingly few shapes. It is quite CPU intensive, but Primitive is optimized to do it as quickly as possible. And the output is inherently vector-based!

Features Explained

Very configurable. Very wow.

Image: Choose the input image that you want the program to draw using primitive shapes.

Shape type: Choose the type of shape that the program should use to draw your image. Most of these are filled shapes, but the beziers are stroked. Combo mode allows the program to pick the best shape at each iteration.

Shape alpha: Constrain the program to use a particular alpha value for each shape, or uncheck the box to let the program optimize the alpha value for each shape individually.

Stroke width: Set the stroke width to be used for quadratic bezier curves. Uncheck the box to let the program optimize the stroke width for each curve.

Shapes per iteration: Generate multiple shapes during each iteration with a more localized search. This is most useful for bezier curves to get good image coverage more quickly.

Background color: Set the background color upon which the shapes will be drawn. Uncheck the box to use the average color of the input image as the background.

Working size: Choose between speed and quality. This option scales the input image to a certain size before running the algorithm on it.

Run until stopped: Choose this mode to run indefinitely, until the image appearance is to your liking.

Run until shapes: Choose this mode to stop running after a certain number of shapes have been generated.

Run until score: Chose thise mode to stop running once the drawn image has a certain amount of similarity to the original input image.

Clear drawing: Clear the drawing to start over with new options.

Revert to defaults: Reset all of the options except for image and shape type back to their original settings.

100 shapes

300 shapes

900 shapes

Formats

Primitive can save its drawing in PNG, JPEG, or SVG formats. You can also set an output resolution to scale it up or down. SVG output consists of a single <rect> element for the background and <path> elements for each shape.

Tips

You can change most of the settings in the middle of a drawing. One interesting use of this is to draw some filled-in shapes first and then draw bezier curves on top to fill in the details.

It's fun to hide the toolbar and enter full screen mode to watch the program draw your photos!