I spent a couple years learning graphics programming to build an iPad app for creating subtle animated effects. The idea was kind of like Procreate but if you h

I spent a couple years learning graphics programming to build an iPad app for creating subtle animated effects. The idea was kind of like Procreate but if you had "animated brushes" that produced glimmer or other types of looping animated effects. From what I've read, the technique behind most digital brushes is to render overlapping "stamps" over the stroke. They're spaced closely enough that you can't actually see the stamps. But if you want to animate the stamps, you either have to store the stroke data as a very large sequence of stamp meshes or you can only work with the data in a raster format. The former is way too many meshes even with instancing, and the latter loses a lot of useful information about the stroke. Imagine you wanted to create a brush where the edges of the stroke kind of pulsate like a laser beam, you ideally want to store that stroke data in a vector format to make it easier to identify e.g. centers and edges. But it turned out to be too challenging for me to figure out how to 1) build a vector representation of a stroke/path without losing some of the control over detail you get with the stamping technique and 2) efficiently render those vectors on the GPU. I'm not sure if this would help with the issues I ran into, but I'm definitely excited to see some focus on 2D rendering improvements!