movie brush preset in v4

[ASARE CHRISTIAN]

Please how do i access the grid tiling movie brush preset in Studio Artist v4

[Synthetik]

Which particular 'grid tiling movie brush' preset are you referring to?

There is a Mosaic Movie Brush category in the AutoPaint preset collection in V4. The Graffiti preset in that category is painting with a grid tiling using a movie brush. You could swap in a different movie brush file into the preset by using the File : Paint Synthesizer : New Movie Brush menu command.

[ASARE CHRISTIAN]

Ok thanks very much.

[Synthetik]

You asked about masking out a white or solid colored background from processing. You could select a portion of the canvas, and then mask the tile painting, or tile the entire canvas and then mask a fill with solid color or the original source coloring as a second step. Or mask the tile painting Here's a tip on masking.

The Path Start control panel also has some settings you could use to inhibit painting in solid colored areas (mask out textures with a value of 0).

[Synthetik]

You also asked about which file format is suitable for making movie brushes. The answer is Quicktime, which uses a .mov file extensions. Quicktime supports numerous compression codecs within the file format, including mpeg. Here's a tip on making a movie brush.

Version 5 has a new feature called an image folder brush. So in V5 you can work directly with a folder of images without having to convert them into a Quicktime movie file for use as a movie brush.

Regarding your question on transparent backgrounds. You can work with source images that have an alpha channel, or movies that contain an embedded alpha channel. The paint synthesizer has controls for inhibiting painting based on alpha channel contents (path start, path end). Or you could build a selection based on alpha for use in masking operations.

You can also turn on alpha compositing in the layer view if you want to work with it there. Unlike programs like photoshop (where alpha is always enabled), you can turn it on or off in Studio Artist. Here's a tip on working with alpha in layers. Here's a tip on generating a movie file with an embedded alpha channel.

[Synthetik]

Here are alpha search results from synthetik.com blog articles. There are articles on alpha masked movie brushes, as well as working with alpha channels in layer there.

[ASARE CHRISTIAN]

Thank you very much. really appreciate it.

[Synthetik]

As far as image file formats go, if you are working with embedded alpha channels, i'd use png. If you don't care about alpha, you can use any file format that studio artist opens. That includes png, jpeg, tiff, psd, etc.

[Synthetik]

You asked about placing specific movie frames from a movie brush in specific areas of the canvas.

The way a movie brush works is that the movie frames are modulated based on the frame indexing options set in the Brush Source control panel in the paint synthesizer. The frames might be sequentially modulated, randomly modulated, modulated over time in an animation, modulated by some kind of interactive pen modulator (pressure, tilt, etc), or modulated by some characteristic of the source image (like luminance or rgb color matching). The source image characteristics are localized, different parts of the source image and their associated location on the canvas are going to modulate to specific movie frames in that canvas location. Which frame depends on the type of movie indexing option you select for your paint preset.

Indexing can be 1 dimensional or 2 dimensional. 2 dimensional indexing allows you to use 2 different modulator inputs to access a specific movie frame. So you could for example use pen pressure and tilt orientation if you wanted to use interactive modulation. You might use pressure to modulate through different sized sub images in your movie frames, and tilt orientation to modulate between different sub image orientations in your movie frames. The User Guide includes a more detailed description of these paint synthesizer indexing controls, and how to configure them.

So you could use interactive modulators to select frames for hand painting on specific parts of the canvas is you wanted to. Or you could just load the individual images as image brushes rather than using a movie brush, and then paint them where you ant them to be places in the canvas.

Here's a tip on movie brush coloring options.

[Synthetik]

RE: Please how do you ensure a smooth transition of images from small to large in a photo mosaic.

...

I don't understand what you are asking with this question. If you can explain it better i can try and answer it. Are you talking about a distribution of different sized images in a mosaic, or the boundaries between cells in a mosaic, or?

[Synthetik]

If you are talking about the distribution of mosiac cells, it really depends on what specific algorithm you are using. If you are tiling and you want to do sub-tiling, then in V4 you need to run several passes to build up the overall sub-tiled effect. The tutorial article i pointed you at before discusses this in detail.

If you are using path start regionization to build up a mosaic (usually irregular cell shapes when using this approach), then you'd adjust the appropriate path start control panel parameters for the particular regionization approach you are using. For a lot of the ones in V4 (like Adaptive Block Regionization), it would be the Max Stroke setting. Making Max Stroke smaller is going to generate fewer regions. Making it bigger is going to generate more regions. usually you want to keep it in the approx range of 50-300 for something like Adaptive Block Regionization.

Here's a tip that discusses the different path start regionization fill options in V4.

Studio Artist 5 has many new path start regionization options. Including new fill optiotns that would have required multitple passes of the paint synthesizer to build in V4. There are several (like Rect Tile H_V Split Regionize) that allow for creating sub-nested tiling effects directly in a single paint synthesizer preset.

Keep in mind that all of these path start regionization algorithms first intelligently analyze the source image, and then break it up into different regions based on the visual characteristics of the source image. So the distribution of small vs large regions is going to track the visual characteristics of the source image. large flat areas of the source image are going to correspond with large regions generated by adaptive path start regionization algorithms. Areas with a lot of visual detail or texture are going to correspond to smaller regions generated by adaptive path start regionization algorithms.

The Vectorizer can also be used as a very configurable regionization option. Here's a tip on how you could use the Vectorizer to build irregular mosaic shapes. Studio Artist 5 allows you to directly embed the Vectorizer inside of a paint preset for region generation (or for building sketch effects). So you can use the Vectorizer in V5 to create adaptive regionization effects in a single paint synthesizer preset. The tip i pointed you at shows how to do it in multiple steps in V4.