Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I made a WebGL-based app that traces images using circles
I was fascinated by this [0] and this video [1]. After many struggles, I finally built this app that traces images using circles similar to what these videos had shown. The most challenging part (to me) is to find a way to convert images to vector lines. I had tried Potrace, but its output is not suitable for my use case: too many small elements share the same border. Potrace's goal is to represent the original image faithfully using vector lines. But I want to trace the image edges. After searching and trying some Potrace alternatives in vain, I finally found my keyword. Surprisingly (to…
This WebGL app reconstructs images using circles arranged to trace edges rather than replicate the original. The maker built it after exploring similar visualization techniques, ultimately developing a custom… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. I made a WebGL-based app that traces images using circles launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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I’ve been working on a project to bridge the gap between AI generation and my AxiDraw, and I think I finally have a workflow that avoids the usual headaches. If you’ve tried plotting AI-generated images, you probably know the struggle: generic tracing tools (like Potrace) trace the outline of a line, resulting in double-strokes that ruin the look and take twice as long to plot. What I tried previously: - Potrace / Inkscape Trace: Great for filled shapes, but results in "hollow" lines for line art. - Canny Edge Detection: Often too messy; it picks up noise and creates jittery paths. -…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I’ve been experimenting with Rust lately and wanted a project that would help me explore some of its lower-level and performance-oriented features. Inspired by Sebastian Lague’s videos, I decided to implement my own ray tracer from scratch. The initial goal was just to render a simple 3D scene in the browser at a reasonable frame rate. It evolved into a small renderer that can: • Run locally or on the web using wgpu and WebAssembly • Perform mesh rendering with a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) for acceleration • Simulate both direct and indirect illumination for photorealistic results • Be…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Creator here. I built ChartGPU because I kept hitting the same wall: charting libraries that claim to be "fast" but choke past 100K data points. The core insight: Canvas2D is fundamentally CPU-bound. Even WebGL chart libraries still do most computation on the CPU. So I moved everything to the GPU via WebGPU: - LTTB downsampling runs as a compute shader - Hit-testing for tooltips/hover is GPU-accelerated - Rendering uses instanced draws (one draw call per series) The result: 1M points at 60fps with smooth zoom/pan. Live demo:…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 5ST
2015 · mattdesl.github.io · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! We're Ben and Izak, founders of Repaint (YC S23). Repaint is like Figma, but for creating real websites. It has panning, zooming, and dragging elements around. The settings closely follow html/css. We think an open canvas is a big improvement over other website builders. Everything is easier: styling, consistency, responsiveness… But making it work was hard! We thought HN would appreciate the tech behind it: - A custom WebGL rendering engine (w/text, shadows, blurs, gradients, & opacity groups) - A partial implementation of the css spec - A custom text editor & text shaper…
2024 · repaint.com · its alternatives →
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Vectrfree tier, from $1.99/mo▲313Free cross-platform vector graphics app
2015 · vectr.com · its alternatives →
- 8
How can you make affine transformations (the only ones SVGs are capable of) resemble perspective transformations?
2025 · seve.blog · its alternatives →
- 9
Flow Lines▲212Mathematical art SVG creator with infinite variations
2019 · msurguy.github.io · its alternatives →
- 10TCtextshader.com▲260
TLDR: Click the link to see some cool visualizations, refresh a few times for random examples, and try editing some of the code yourself. This is a small weekend project of mine inspired by shadertoy.com It's a static single-page site hosted on GitHub pages so the website design is pretty barebones. I'm not a web developer so I mainly wanted to create a Cool Thing with my free time and not have to learn tons of front-end to do it. I'd love to hear what people think about it and please post or send me any shaders you make! You can use the link button in the bottom right to share. I hope that…
2022 · textshader.com · its alternatives →
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The latest 3Blue1Brown video [1] about the M. C. Escher print gallery effect inspired me to re-implement the effect as WebGL fragment shader on my own. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldxFjLJ3rVY
Apr 2026 · static.laszlokorte.de · its alternatives →
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This is a GPU "software" raytracer (i.e. using manual ray-scene intersections and not RTX) written using the WebGPU API that renders glTF scenes. It supports many materials, textures, material & normal mapping, and heavily relies on multiple importance sampling to speed up convergence.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13MF
2011 · demoseen.com · its alternatives →
- 14
INSTAD.IO▲202Automagically converts vector images into sketchy style
2021 · instad.io · its alternatives →
- 15
SVG animation from multiple SVGs or single GIF using tracer - tomkwok/svgasm
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16AL
Hi HN - this is a little side project I threw together. Some implementation details: image processing is all done with headless GIMP (running inside a Docker container) through its built-in Python API. It's _very_ slow (about 50 seconds/image), and currently it processes exactly one image at a time. The website is built with NextJS; payments are processed by Stripe. I've had the best results with pictures of houses, although certain photos of people or nature can look neat, too. (For example: https://brushify.art/s/ruYmQWk, original photo from…
2022 · brushify.art · its alternatives →
- 17
C++ Path Tracer from scratch with zero third-party libraries. - themartiano/luz
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Vectorizer.io▲158Fast and easy way to vectorize an image online
2016 · vectorizer.io · its alternatives →
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Browse and share GPU-made GIFs. Explore GLSL shader experiments, search by topic, and open any piece in the editor to learn or remix.
2018 · shadergif.com · its alternatives →
- 22IT
I built this app over a week as a way to learn how to use TensorFlow with Mobilenets and to get some experience with Google Play (and partly as a dare). It's written in Java, as I wasn't able to find a Kotlin API for TFLite. It was built with Bazel. I'm pretty satisfied with the actual detector's performance, although I expect I could improve the UI a little bit. It's a weird UX, as you want it to be as simple and fast as possible (loss/notloss) but you also want it to have some sort of recognizability. I would love to hear your thoughts.…
2018 · its alternatives →
- 23
Creating high-quality scientific figures can be time-consuming and challenging, even though sketching ideas on paper is relatively easy. Furthermore, recreating existing figures that are not stored in formats preserving semantic information is equally complex. To tackle this problem, we introduce DeTikZify, a novel multimodal language model that automatically synthesizes scientific figures as semantics-preserving TikZ graphics programs based on sketches and existing figures. We also introduce a Monte Carlo Tree Search-based inference algorithm that enables DeTikZify to iteratively refine its…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Convert bitmap images into monochrome vector graphics
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU – even in the browser alternatives
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- SVG Triangulation for WebGL alternatives
- Repaint – a WebGL based website builder alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →