First impressions of a beginner

Hi this forum! I am new to Studio Artist and first of all I wanted to thank you for your contributions and efforts to create this community. Sorry I discovered so late this software! I think it is a fantastic tool and summarizes many of the features I've spent years trying to get through different software or Processing programming attempts. I am eager to discover its potential and learn its intricacies!

In a first approach, I have had very good impressions and many promising and rewarding results, I think the user guide is an invaluable source of information and knowledge and another one, as I suppose we all do, starting from a preset and trying to figure out which of the editable parameters are primarily responsible for its behavior. I think this is a very effective strategy to assimilate concepts. However, in this regard, I find the following two startup problems due to the large number of editable parameters and I'd like to share with you:

 1 - The effect of some parameters is masked (or turned off in extreme) by the value of another parameter. It would be interesting that the editor indicate which parameters are no longer applicable from the current settings. For example, in "Pen Mode" parameters corresponding to "Region Specifier" "Fill Type Region", etc. They seem to have no effect while the value of "Pen Mode" is for example "Interactive Pen". This is just an obvious example but there are a lot of parameters that are no longer applicable to a given configuration. If what is wanted is that the user has at its disposal all available parameters, a possible strategy would be let the disabled parameters indicate what other parameter triggers its activation, etc.
Ideally, it would be cool if the editor could tell (by some kind of visual aid for example) to what extent the modification of a parameter impacts the actual result (I'm imagining some sort of behind-the-scenes simulation and result-comparison algorithm ;).

2 - When a preset gives me an interesting feature, I experiment trying to "isolate" this feature in the corresponding parameters configuration. To do it I try to compare its configuration with another preset that does not have that feature (I think this is our natural way of learning). The problem is that there are countless parameters! and is not always obvious which subsection does the feature comes from. It is possible that the particular effect I have just found is due to the "Path shape", or the "Path start", or is it due to the "Path angle"? or perhaps the "Path application"?..
I think it could be helpful to have some way to compare presets or copy and paste the various subsections configuration from one to another to find changes in the effects searched.

Anyway, I hope to have time to continue experimenting and maybe transfer to this forum my concerns, questions and suggestions. Thanks for your attention!

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  • There are some paint synth memories available for quickly switching back and forth between different paint synthesizer settings when editing. You can access some of them using the memory buttons located at the bottom of the paint synth editor.

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    There are 4 patch memories, which save and restore the complete set of paint synth parameters. (P1,P2,P3,P4)  Note that if you hold the cursor over the memory buttons, you get some information about them  in the bottom left corner of the status area in the workspace.

    Pa1 just saves and restores path settings. B1 just saves and restores brush settings. So you can use the path and brush memories to swap in different path generation or brush parameters when editing. So this is one form of 'isolation' editing that is available in V4.  There are 2 additional path and brush memories that you can access via the Edit : Paint Synth menu options. The E memory button saves and restores the paint synth settings used for the eraser tip when working with a wacom pen. You could also use it as an additional working memory if not using a wacom pen.

    • Yes, these buttons are really helpful to investigate the presets!

      By the way, I assume that the file's preset is not open format, although the parameterization it stores is completely public, is it scheduled to migrate to XML or provide some other functionality to exploit them? I keep thinking about high-level strategies that allow me to compare  presets to group or cluster with its functionality (t-SNE, for example)

      • The file format is based on iff chunks, and is binary. We have stayed with this older style format to provide compatibility with old presets from previous versions of Studio Artist.

        We may move to some kind of xml format in the future, or at least allow for that as an optional input.

        Yes, t-SNE clustering of presets would be interesting.

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