openll-asset-generator

Font Asset Generator based on OpenLL Specifications

What is openll-asset-generator? (llassetgen)

The openll-asset-generator, or in short llassetgen, is a cross-platform C++ generator for font assets. Font assets are needed for rendering fonts in various realtime-applications. With llassetgen, the user can adapt the parameters via CLI, GUI or can directly use the core lib. The GUI offers a pre-render using the generated font asset.

On the master-branch you will find everything tested using CI (Appveyor, Travis). On the develop-branch you find more features and fixes, but they are not thoroughly tested due to dependency issues on the CI servers.

What is a font asset?

A font asset consists of the data needed to render a font.

• The glyph atlas is a visual representation of the characters supported by the font. It can be a bitmap, a signed distance field, vector graphics, etc. The llassetgen creates signed distance fields as documented by Chris Green of Valve in the SIGGRAPH 2007 paper Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects..
• The font description file contains the typesetting information that is needed to position each glyph correctly: the position in the glyph atlas, the position on the baseline (advance, height, ...) and the kerning data.

Main Workflow

1. Load the font file as it is found on your machine. Then generate a high-resolution bitmap image containing the glyphs.
2. Pack all glyphs into a glyph atlas for lower space consumption.
3. Render the distance field of every glyph. Input: high resolution bitmap image. Output: lower resolution distance field.
4. Export the texture atlas (i.e. the glyph atlas as distance field) and the font description file (i.e. information needed to use that atlas and to typeset the glyphs).

Project Health

Service	System	Compiler	Status
Travis-CI	Ubuntu 14.04, macOS	GCC 4.8, Clang 3.9 AppleClang 8.1
AppVeyor	Windows	MSVC 2015 MSVC 2017

Installation

Windows

The core library and its applications can be installed either by downloading an installer, e.g., the latest x64 installer for Microsoft Visual Studio 2017, or downloading and extracting one of the precompiled archives, e.g. runtime, examples, and dev. Alternatively, download the source code and commence building from source. See latest release.

Ubuntu

We plan to provide the Font Asset Generator using PPAs. Until then, download the source code and commence building from source.

OS X

We plan to provide the Font Asset Generator via homebrew package manager. Until then, download the source code and commence building from source.

Build Instructions

Prerequisites and Dependencies

Necessary for the core library (llassetgen) and the CLI application (llassetgen-cmd)

• CMake 3.4 or higher for building from source
• Freetype to load and render fonts
• libpng to import and export PNGs images.
• fontconfig on Unix systems.

Additionally necessary to build the rendering application (llassetgen-rendering):

• GLM 0.9.9.2 for OpenGL math and data structures
• cpplocate to find run-time rendering shaders
• glbinding as OpenGL API binding
• globjects to wrap OpenGL API objects
• Qt5 5.0 or higher for GUI elements

Compile Instructions

For compilation, a C++11 compliant compiler, e.g., GCC 4.8, Clang 3.9, AppleClang 8.1, MSVC 2015, is required.

First, download the source code as archive. or via git:

> git clone https://github.com/cginternals/openll-asset-generator.git
> cd openll-asset-generator

Then, depending on the version of globjects you want to build, choose the appropriate tag or branch, e.g., for the 1.0 release:

> git fetch --tags
> git checkout v1.0-master

The actual compilation can be done using CMake and your favorite compiler and IDE.

Usage

To see how to use our core lib, you can explore the following two applications that come with llassetgen: llassetgen-cmd and llassetgen-rendering. Further below you find details on the used algorithms and parameters.

CLI

The CLI application llassetgen-cmd provides two subcommands:

• distfield applies a distance transform to an input image
• atlas generates a font atlas, optionally applying a distance transform and creating a font file in the FNT format.

The following examples introduce the basic parameters of distfield and atlas. To see a list of all the options, run llassetgen-cmd distfield --help or llassetgen-cmd atlas --help.

Examples

Take the existing file image.png and apply a distance transform, then write the result to distancefield.png:

llassetgen-cmd distfield image.png distancefield.png

Create an atlas for the Arial font containing only the glyphs 'a', 'b' and 'c', and write it to atlas.png:

llassetgen-cmd atlas --fontname Arial --glyph abc atlas.png

Create an atlas containing all printable ASCII glyphs, with a font size of 256 pixels, then use the Parabola Envelope algorithm to apply a distance transform. Write the resulting distance field to atlas.png and generate an FNT file, which is written to atlas.fnt:

llassetgen-cmd atlas --ascii --fontsize 256 --distfield parabola --fontname Arial atlas.png --fnt

Since a distance field creates a "glow" around every glyph, add 20 pixels of padding around each glyph in the atlas to create the necessary space. To improve the final rendering quality of the font, apply a 4x downsampling to every glyph:

llassetgen-cmd atlas --padding 20 --downsampling 4 --ascii --distfield parabola --fontname Arial atlas.png

Rendering

Additionally to the CLI, you can use the GUI-application llassetgen-rendering. It offers a preview of the rendering using the calculated distance field. Using the GUI, you can change all parameters and see their direct impact on the final image.

llassetgen-rendering uses the fragment-shader as in OpenLL for Super Sampling. Rendering parameters are:

Super Sampling

Choose the type of Super Sampling.

Threshold

The default value is 0.5, since the Distance Transform considers 0.5 as the contour. Choosing a smaller value renders the glyphs bold; a larger value renders them thinner, until they completely disappear. A smaller value than 0.3 is clamped to 0.3, because such fragments are dicarded in fragment shader for performance reasons.

Switch Rendering

You can toggle between rendering the calculated distance field or rendering the resulting glyphs when using the calculated distance field.

Details on Algorithms and Parameters

Font Name

The font is loaded from the local machine using the given font name, e.g. Arial, Verdana

(Original) Font Size

This size is used to pre-render the glyphs before the Distance Transform is applied. A higher value results in smoother fonts (high resolution font), but the Distance Transform performs slower. We encourage larger font size, as the Distance Field is only generated once.

Padding

Space that is added around the glyphs. Gives more space for dynamic range of distance transformed glyphs. That means, the glyphs get 'larger' and thus need more space to not be cut off.

Downsampling

Distance Fields are meant to be downsampled. We offer different downsampling types and also different scaling factors.

Dynamic Range

The Distance Transform calculates values, that need to be clamped in order to generate a PNG. Choose the min (black) and max (white) values. A lower black value will make the distance fields wider; a lower white value will make the distance fields brighter. In most cases, the black value should be lower than the white value. However, swapping the black and white value will invert the colors of the atlas.

Packing

Our implemented packing algorithms are based on the publication by Jukka Jylänki: A thousand ways to pack the bin -- a practical approach to two-dimensional rectangle bin packing (2010), except that for now, we don't use multiple bins (i.e. textures).

The Shelf Bin Packing (O(n log(n))) performs faster, but there are cases where Max Rects Packing (O(n^5)) gives better results.

Parameters: All glyph sizes, downsampled.

Distance Transform

llassetgen offers two algorithms for the distance field creation:

The Algorithm "Dead-Reckoning" is based on: GREVERA, George J. The “dead reckoning” signed distance transform. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 2004, 95. Jg., Nr. 3, S. 317-333.. There are 10 accesses per pixel over 4 passes.

The Algorithm called "Parabola Envelope" is based on: FELZENSZWALB, Pedro; HUTTENLOCHER, Daniel. Distance transforms of sampled functions. Cornell University, 2004.. There are 4 accesses per pixel over 2 passes, thus this algorithm is considerably faster than the "Dead-Reckoning" while not resulting in a lower quality distance field.

Parameters:

Input

Bitmap image containing a mask which indicates where the charater is filled (true = inside, false = outside). The necessary padding should already be included in the input.

Output

Float image containing the signed distance to the closest edge, measured in pixels. The output can be rendered to a PNG file by assigning a dynamic range (black & white distance value), which also clamps all values above and below that range.