Burin
Draw vector artwork in Resolume, at any size
What it does
Point it at an SVG and it draws it, in Resolume Arena and Avenue, and in DaVinci Resolve, Nuke, Natron and Vegas from the same code. It comes as two plugins because FFGL only finds one entry point per binary: Burin is a source that draws on its own background, and Burin Over is an effect that draws over the clip it sits on.
Zoom a bitmap eight times and it's eight times blurrier. Zoom a vector eight times and it isn't, but only if something re-rasterises it, and re-rasterising a thousand-path drawing every frame isn't something a show can afford. So the scale snaps to a ladder of half-octave rungs and the drawing is only rebuilt when the rung changes, always rounding up so the hardware only ever shrinks it and never blows it up. A six-octave zoom rebuilds thirteen times across six hundred frames, and a still frame never rebuilds at all. The raster only covers what's on screen, not the whole document, so going from 1:1 to fifty times doesn't make it any bigger.
Beyond sharpness, that gets you everything you can only do while the paths are still separate. Fill and stroke are the file's own paint, tested separately, so Stroke Only on artwork made entirely of solids gives you a wireframe its author never drew. The write-on draws each stroke in along its own measured length, with a stagger between shapes and an order (document, reversed, longest first, shortest first or a stable scatter), so a technical drawing can build its structure first and the detail last. Recolour replaces fill or stroke and keeps each shape's own alpha, and can walk the hue across the drawing a shape at a time.
One thing to know before you export: live text doesn't render. The SVG parser has no text support at all, no fonts and no glyph outlines, so a drawing made of live text parses without complaint and comes out empty. Convert text to outlines first. The plugin counts what it had to ignore and says so in its log, and the web demo warns you in the browser, because a file that looks right in preview and blank in the show is the worst possible way to find out.
- Rebuilt at the size it is being shown, on a half-octave ladder that only ever rounds up
- The raster covers the visible window, not the document, so a deep zoom stays bounded
- Fills, strokes or both — the file's own paint, not an edge detect
- Write-on along each stroke's own length, with per-shape stagger and five orders
- Isolate a range of shapes by index, for building a drawing up piece by piece
- Recolour fill or stroke keeping each shape's alpha, with a hue walk across the drawing
- Zoom, pan, rotate and spin, free-running or locked to the host's beat or bar
- A stroke-width floor in device pixels, so hairlines thin instead of vanishing
- Universal macOS bundle (Apple Silicon and Intel), a Windows DLL, and an OpenFX bundle for macOS, Windows and Linux
Where it stands
Released at v0.1.10. The last two point releases changed nothing in the Resolume picture: v0.1.9 put SW in front of both names in Resolume's browser, and v0.1.10 fixed the OpenFX build on Resolve's Fusion page, where every render used to fail. The central claim is measured. The offline harness renders a hard edge at six zoom levels and requires the edge to stay one device pixel wide from 1× to 32×, then does it again with the rebuild taken out and requires that to blow up to twenty-five pixels, so it's a comparison rather than the same claim restated. The GPU and CPU renderers agree bit for bit, which keeps Resolume and Resolve honest with each other. Both FFGL plugins load and render in Resolume Arena, checked after release, but that's 'it loads and it draws', not a sweep of every control in a live host. The OpenFX build renders as a tool on Resolve's Fusion page (Resolve Studio 21.1, macOS), and hasn't been tried on Resolve's other pages or in Nuke or Natron. Try it in your own rig before you trust it in a show.
Watch it running
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