improve mosaic making workflow - feature wishlist

[Saša S]

I wish the following would be possible, so making mosaics would be fast and fun. So I wish

• instead of making a moviebrush I could just point SA to a folder with my images
• I could use images of different shapes and sizes
• I could use not only raster but also vector images
• SA was able to lay out mosaic of images with different shapes and sizes by stucking them the way I want in arbitrary shapes 
• there was a way to work with text in a similar way to Tagxedo
• MSG editor functionality was documented and included generation of simple geometrical objects
• there was an easy way to edit (or import from photoshop) gradients and palettes in MSG 
• I could use transparency in MSG 

 

[Synthetik]

Thanks for the feedback!

 

The old MSG Evolver application that shipped with Studio Artist 3.5 had a feature called the ArtMapper that did allow for an alternative approach to generating photo mosaics that allowed you to build an image database directly from a folder of images. The ArtMapper could reference the actual images on your hard disk when making a photo mosaic.

 

As far as text, there are some features you probably aren't familar with that do allow you to work with single text words in blocks to build text mosaic effects. We could certainly expand the range of text mosaic features in the future.

http://studioartist.posterous.com/painting-words-in-paint-regions

 

Can you explain a little more about what you mean by 'SA was able to lay out mosaic of images with different shapes and sizes by stucking them the way I want in arbitrary shapes'

 

 

 

[Saša S]

Sorry for being unclear. Similar to what you get in Tagxedo: you have many words of different sizes and shapes and the program fits them evenly inside some area. Would be nice  instead of words to use shapes or non-rectangular images

[Willie Richardson]

yes the new wordfoto idevice app does something similar, funny I was just going to write about this.

[Saša S]

Another app I came accross called Percolator

Is it possible to emulate this effect using SA?

I read this post and other posts discussing Appolonian gasket effect, but couldn't replicate the desired effect

[Synthetik]

We can beef up that MSG processor to allow for inset circle patterning and source color mapping. That's been added to the 'to do' list.

 

The Vectorizer has a close packed circle shape type option for the Vectorizer. It doesn't currently allow for inset circles, but we could add that.

 

There might be a way to use the paint synthesizer to do this kind of thing. I'll think about it and post something if i come up with some interesting approaches.

[Synthetik]

So i added a dualClosePackCircle option to the Vectorizer shape technique.

[Michael OBannon]

Wow, this is really a nice effect.  When will it be available to users?

 

Thanks,

Michael

[Synthetik]

The close pack circle option is already available in 4.03. The only thing i added to the above is the dual coloring for the circles. That's in the development code for future releases.

 

I attached a 4.03 vectorizer preset to generate close packed vector circles.

closePackCircles1.vec.zip