I would think it could be used as a brush targeting variable (i.e. put stroke placement priority on alpha). This way when auto painting is used with this option enabled it should fill the canvas more quickly in many cases. I realise it's not useful for all brushes... such as outline sketch type brushes. However, I have so wanted some way for brush placement to fill unfilled areas first with the majority of paint presets as it is a good way to lay down a back painting. As is it can take much longer than necessary due to many strokes falling over already filled areas when there are still blank areas of the canvas to be filled.
Ignore this if you've found some other brilliant solution for version 5. It just happened to occur to me as a relatively simple (in concept) solution to a pet peeve I have mentioned before.
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Eric there are a number of settings that can be adjusted to have the brush hit white canvas only. Check out the various start probabilities, Path Application Probabilities and the Path End settings. Beyond those you can already paint on alpha to the extent that this means painting on a selection.
It seems to me that targeting alpha would be more effective to be sure the entire canvas gets covered. Though perhaps I'm not thinking correctly. Targeting white or targeting black for example may not stroke over the areas that are black or white in the source image. If you are working with strokes that have more than one shade for example you might want even the pure white or black areas of the source image to produce strokes over the already matching color on the canvas.
Still, I need to read some wonderful links that John was kind enough to provide
I believe that V4 has options that let you specify that path start locations only occur in areas of the source image where the alpha channel is full on.
Look in the Path Start control panel in the Probability and Inhibitor controls there.
As far as only painting where paint has not been laid down before, that's the whole point of the Blanking Buffer in Studio Artist. Although as LiveArt mentions, you can also use various control options to key into only painting where you have a solid background color like white that hasn't been filled in already.
I would highly suggest reading this tip called Controlling Where Automatic Paint Strokes are Drawn.
It discusses all of this in great detail.
One thing to be very aware of is that vector paint presets in V4 don't write anything into the blanking buffer. I even used an underlining font to make you really pay attention to that sentence.
Because it's a 1 bit per pixel raster frame buffer that is used to build a map of paint coverage and the vector drawing routines don't affect it in the least bit in V4. V4 vector paint presets only draw directly into the canvas using GPU drawing code, so that they will run really fast. So if you are using that whole Blanking Buffer approach to do this, then you wonder why it's not working if you are using a vector paint preset in V4.
And we did fix that issue in V5. By putting on our thinking caps. And thinking real hard.
Now the notion of adding options to modulate path start or path end based on alpha information in the draw canvas is interesting. It's a very good suggestion, so i will add that to my long list of fun things to possibly add in the future.
Although also a possibly very confusing and dangerous option for people since it's easy to setup Studio Artist so that the canvas alpha channel is set to full on when you do an erase, especially an erase to the source image. And then people would be wondering why nothing was painting after you did that. And it would be because the paint synthesizer had been programmed to stop painting anywhere alpha was full on in the canvas. And alpha would be full on everywhere. And no paint would happen at all.
I can appreciate the last paragraph... that's why I have mentioned in the past the possibility of adding hover tool tips and such for new users especially which coul be disabled once you are confident enough with the software. I am also glad to give you any ideas intended or otherwise as it all ends up contributing to a more robust program in the future.
This is off topic a bit here, but I am wondering if you can't take the raster based brushes and convert them to proceedural based brushes by means of vectorizing them with newer vector blending options (i.e. mesh gradients) to stitch more solidly colored regions together as well perhaps. I was just thinking it might help in finding ways to make all brushes resolution independant. We had discussed possibly applying your enlargement algorithm before, but it never hurts having more than one approach to try.
As always thank you for the tip.
Our gpu based vector drawing api does not support mesh gradients, or i would be heavily using them. But we have discussed writing that api ourselves. so, there are lots of cool things you could do with that particular feature.
Eps3 file format supports them. I don't think SVG does. Otherwise i think our vector drawing api would include them. It has some gradient support, but not that.
Upcoming V5 has a ton of new vector painting features. Some i believe no one has ever seen before. So that's something to look forward to.
There is also a way to use the vectorizer to on the fly vectorize each individual raster paint stroke 1 by 1 when you output a recorded PASeq to either eps or svg vector file output. We've actually had that feature since V3.5. Not quite the same thing as what you are proposing (mesh gradients).
yes, I have yet to see a vectorizer that included mesh gradients, but that would be a pretty cool feature if it could be implemented. I like to play with mesh gradients and shape blending in vector design software. you can get some pretty cool stuff to happen blending multiple shapes in a chain along a path.
Just to be clear, you are fully free to work with transparent layers and enable alpha drawing in your paint synthesizer presets. If you so desire to work that way in V4. Here's a tip to read very carefully before you go off and do that.
And png image file output is going to be the best output option to use if you are working that way. We should mention that in the tip.
We encourage people to not work that way, because many of our glorious wet paint presets are not going to look the way you want them to look and work if you are using alpha channels to define transparency in the canvas. It has to do with the way they mix color on the canvas to simulate wetness.
Alpha channels were really designed back in the good old days to composite different objects into a scene. And 'paint' was some solid colored object that just happened to be drawn out along a path. Go back and read all of those old Siggraph papers on the development of Renderman if you want to understand where all this 'alpha' stuff really came from. And photoshop kind of grew out of that particular way of viewing the world. Right down to it's original compositing options, which were directly lifted from those old Siggraph papers. And it is a very useful way of viewing the world certainly.
We viewed the world a little bit differently. Different kinds of paint strokes for different folks.
Now you can do it the alpha enabled way if you want to in Studio Artist. But we try to push you down a different pathway. As opposed to only letting you do it the alpha enabled way, or refusing to allow you to even do it the alpha enabled way. We give you the choice. And enough rope to hang yourself along the way if you so desire.
And again, some programs go out of their way to always hide the danergous rope from sight, so that you can never ever get into trouble And you can never ever do certain really cool things either beause of that. Again, different ways of viewing the world. Do we hide all of the kitchen knives, or let people use them all, even though they might cut themselves in the process. imagine a kitchen that didn't let you use any knives, except for a really dull butter knife. And the stove never really gets hot, because then you might burn yourself. You will never ever hurt yourself in that magical kitchen. But you will never be able to caramelize a sauce or cut any vegetables in that kitchen either. And is that really the kitchen you want to be cooking in.
No, I am not looking for a multitude of safety rails to hem me in. that's why I moved away from the iphone and the hassle of jailbreaking it... even though in some cases I preferred the apps. In the end, having to brute force the phone into doing what I wanted it to do just irritated me too much for the few nicer apps to compensate any longer. Most of the computer learning I have under my belt has been as a result of screwing them up and then having to fix them up... though the electronics and programming courses didn't hurt. It's the stuff I end up having to figure out myself that really sticks the best. I can understand the approach you are pushing, and in many cases I can use it. Occasionally though, there are things that just make more sense the more traditional way. When you're looking for a particular result... the how of it isn't always as important as the result itself. If I can acheive something faster or better one way or the other... that is usually what I will do... unless I am doing it simply as a learning exercise. Both have their time and place though.
I will have to read up on the links you gave me though... especially the blanking buffer. I understand that appearance of strokes might be odd somYour everything including the kitchen sink sjoftware is great.... I'm always finding myself going off on tangents though.... just so many options.
I tend to work in PNG anyhow, so that is good to know.