Preset Organization

[johndalton]

We're in the process of looking at reorganizing the factory presets. So i thought i'd open up a discussion about this so that people could comment on how they would like to see us organize the factory presets. It's kind of a challenge because different people have different workflows. And presets that some people might think are magical other people might think are garbage, and vice versa. People who have been using Studio Artist for a long time might want us to leave things the way they are while people just getting started might want things organized very differently.

Some people have asked us to only provide 20 presets that they personally like and throw out the rest. I tend to think that having access to a large range of different presets is a good thing, even if in your daily work you only use a small subset of those.

So feel free to leave your suggestions regarding how you would like to see us reorganize the factory presets. Now is a great time to speak up since your suggestions will directly affect what we are currently doing with reconfiguring the factory preset organization.

[liveart]

Ok

just for a bit of background to what follows. A while back, In my efforts to learn the presets I created a Mother of all Pas or GrandPas as I call it. This Gem runs through the first 12 categories of paint presets hand drawing and then auto drawing each. I have intentions of eventually doing ALL the presets but that might be beyond my attention span.

Having looked again at the product of this PAS with an eye to how things might be organized I have come up with the following:

I would like to see the Presets scored on the factors shown in the attached file. The scoring is on a 5 point scale which is relative or differential between 2 opposing characteristics. Ideally this would be a community effort. The more eyeballs doing the scoring the better. The scoring should be done into a live relational data table.

Ideally the rating would be done after watching the preset hand draw then auto draw from a standard source.

I envision a web page where a clip of the preset would run and the differential scoring table would be below the clip with radio buttons or check boxes. The viewer watches the clip then rates its characteristics on the table. But there might be other ways to collect the data.

The results would create self-similar groupings of the presets as well as allow the users to search by relevant factors. (Ideally a future search function would go well beyond this and include the ability to search by parameters used in the preset as well as other meta data tags).

I think that the factors on the table are generally self-explanatory with the possible exception of what I mean by texture - simple as compared to dimensional - flat. Textured is a preset that incorporates the procedural texture into the paint color-- like "fixed color example 1" from the 3.0 tutorial set. Dimensional would be any that use gradient or 3d lighting to appear to raise up (or down) from the "canvas".

If we had this system I would the also recommend that the Names of the presets be related to whatever "real" world analog there might be. This would help new users feel comfortable.

Why a differential? because I like Jean's "simple" categories idea, but the presets are rarely just one thing.. like wet. Not only can some thing be Wet and Soft or Wet and Hard, presets and be somewhat wet or somewhat organic. The differential avoids creating subcategories by recognizing the continuum.



In addition to the rating sheet, I attach the GrandPAS. As I mentioned I have done the first 12 categories. i.e., General through Chalk. If anyone wants to help continue the effort all you need to do is run the first 7 actions. Then select the next preset and cmd-k, then cmd-r and then set canvas to white at the end of the run.. repeat in order until you are completely bored.. WHY do them in order? because the concept I had is to eventually capture the grand sequence to a movie and then split it by preset so one could make a data base with video preview of the presets doing the sequence in order was the best way to have a double check on which preset is running in any given clip.

[johndalton]

You could use gallery show to build a paseq that runs through all the presets via action drawing.

I'll think about if adding some kind of draw from bezier path functions to gallery show makes sense or not. The hand drawing is is the part that you couldn't do automatically with gallery show currently.

[liveart]

yes I know. I am not certain that draw from bezier paths is necessary for the gallery either. Though it is a part of many, very many, of my personal Paseqs. It really is necessary though when evaluating/rating a paint preset because the autodraw and the handdraw can be so very different at times.

[johndalton]

The other factor people should be aware of is that pen pressure, tilt, tilt orientation may dramatically affect a hand drawn paint preset. So ideally if you are using a bezier path or set of paths to evaluate a paint preset for hand drawing that bezier path needs to have been hand drawn freestyle using the appropriate interactive pen adjustments. As opposed to building a bezier path using handles and adding individual segments or automatically generating it.

[Dee Flouton]

Speaking of gallery show, I was curious and had to look it up, since this was the first mention of it that I had seen. I read what the help menu had to say about the gallery preferences, it's sub menus and running the show, but it did not clarify its purpose. When I ran it (on whatever was on the screen at the time) I saw lots of actions I've never seen before, but it didn't help me to understand why I would want to make use of it. You say that it could be used "to build a paseq that runs through all the presets via action drawing", but that still leaves me in the dark....

[Donna Kuhn]

as i understand it, it can be used as an art installation that changes indefinitely and can also be used to generate paintings if you save it as a history sequence or movie stream. if you choose to mutate any of the presets etc in preferences you can keep the new ones generated in the history sequence.

[johndalton]

You can use gallery show for a bunch of different things. The original idea was to provide a feature so that people could construct live dynamic painting picture frames or displays. So someone could build a gallery exhibit or performance that was a live always changing dynamic painting.

You have different options for whether you want the source image to be always changing or static, and can work with folders of different images or live video capture as a source. And you have different options for working with presets and how they are processed. You can work with custom favorites categories, or with paint, PASeq, or MSG factory preset collections. By putting together a custom set of individual presets in a favorites category you can build an infinite variety of different gallery show performances. You can mix and match different preset types in a favorites folder

Presets can be run in order, or randomly, or dynamically mutated before being run. You can determine how long Studio Artist pauses at the end of a gallery show cycle, and limit the number of path starts if working with paint presets (since often they have very large path start numbers to they will run forever until you manually stop them).

You can use gallery show in conjunction with Studio Artist's movie or image stream features, so all of the unique art images of video frames generated by a particular gallery show can be save as a folder of images or a quicktime movie file.

After gallery show was running we quickly realized that there are a lot of other uses for it. It's great for testing purposes, so we actually use it internally here to automatically test new builds of Studio Artist.

When you watch gallery show run with collections of PASeqs and multiple source images it quickly becomes obvious that it's a great way to automatically generate large quanitites of different randomly generated art images that you can then cull through after the fact for any keepers. If you turn on history recording you can record everything that happened in the gallery show run as well as history steps. So if you are using preset randomization features you can then cull through the set of new presets you created and again save new presets as keepers if they create effects you really like.

[Dee Flouton]

Very interesting, but I would like to see a video tutorial in order to be able to better understand it's options and possibilities, especially in regard to your last paragraph, John, ie generate various images to cull through later for keepers. Would the images be saved individually, or in a stream?

[johndalton]

You would open a stream, setup a stream write flag for 'enable write on gallery show cycle' and then the images would be saved automatically to the open stream. If you wanted individual images you could use an image stream, if you wanted a movie where each frame in the movie was one of the gallery sow images you could use a movie stream.

[liveart]

I hesitate to ask this here because it is off topic, but in regard to the Gallery show:

when one runs a gallery show with history recording on, does the history record the change of source image? I see that it records the steps, but if the gallery show was running with a folder of source images one would want to record the source image change too.

[Francis Stellitano]

What about a dynamic organization - put them in a data base? That way each user can sort them as they require. I know it is easy to suggest something when some else is doing the work but that is what I would prefer.

That and the ability, to create one's own sub-groups like you have now but more capability.