Gallery Show Preferences setting for "Loop Max"

[Joel Nisson]

Can anyone tell me what the "Loop Max" setting in Studio Artist>Preferences>Gallery is for?

I am also looking for a tutorial for what the other Gallery Show Preferences do.

Thanks.

--JN

[Synthetik]

The 'loop' refers to loop action. V5 introduced a number of different 'Loop Action' option in the gallery show techniques you can choose from. These let you run the associated presets being selected by the technique in loop action mode. Some Dual Paint preset in particular need to be run in loop action mode to see anything interesting happen.

I'll put together a tutorial that discusses some of the other V5 gallery show features.

Any specific questions in addition to the one you just asked, feel free to ask here and i can provide more detailed information.

[Joel Nisson]

I'm a little confused about the term "loop action". I often run Loop Action from the main menu when sampling presets. But are you referring to presets that have Loop Action built into them? Does the Loop Max setting in Prefs>Gallery cause the loop action? or just limit it when it is built into the Preset.

Also, mine seems to default to Loop Max of -1 in Prefs>Gallery. What does that signify?

Thanks for the prompt response.

[Synthetik]

The original V4 gallery show features didn't include any way to run presets in loop action mode. They could only be run as normal action painting (pressing the action button).

Loop action involves shirt pressing the action button, or running the loop action main menu. loop action continuously restarts the preset after it stops, running it over and over again until the user manually stops it by pressing the space bar.

After V4 was released and people started playing with gallery show, user's requested that we include some feature in gallery show that allowed presets to be run in loop action mode as opposed to normal action mode. Specifically, people wanted to run dual paint or spiro paint presets that required loop action in order to get anything visually useful out of them.

So we added the new technique options that offer loop action playback. Of course the issue in gallery show is that GS needs to know when to end the GS cycle and move on to the new one. So the loop action max setting provides a maximum number of loop action cycles before the loop is terminated, and gallery show continues on to it's next cycle. Due to a lack of space in the dialog, the preference option is called Loop Max as opposed to Loop Action Max.

[Synthetik]

-1 is used in Studio Artist to signify that an action should run forever (which means until the user stops it manually). So after we introduced the loop max feature in gallery show, people wanted an option where the loop action would keep running until the user manually terminated the current gallery show cycle (by press shift spacebar). Using -1 for loop max lets you specify that particular option (loop action keeps running until the user presses shift spacebar if they want to stop the current gallery show cycle and move on to the next one).

[Joel Nisson]

All clear. Thank you very much.

And, if possible, I would like to see the tutorial about Gallery Show that you mentioned in your first reply.

--JN