The more I play with studio artist. The more I think some dedicated means of using manually drawn guide lines to influence stroke directions would be aid in creating more natural appearing semi-automatic results. Usually the most natural looking results when trying to emulate natural media taditional styles using atumated processes seem to be arrived at with some manual guidance. This isn't a a new comment from me really, but I thought it bared repeating. Some sort of bezier curve guides are one such option we previously mentioned. I also think the manual masking tools could be improved quite a bit in general usability. Also, I was thinking about how you mentioned the way in which some processes of creating wet looking paints in such would not wok properly on an alpha layer. Is there any reason using a layer mask after the fact couldn't be used to acheive much the same result without having the results messed up, or am I missing some key dependency in which any use of alpha pre or post processing would screw up the results?
Some things may be in the works for v5; I don't really know what your roadmap look like.
By the way, I personally could use some hotkey or quick switching method for switching between image controlled stroke directions and manual control over stroke direction when using assisted painting. I know I can dig into the editor and change that, but there are certain things it would be nice to have quicker access to. Perhaps some other common settings like scatter, stroke length, size and opacity... at least when using "Manual" brushes. Perhaps there is already a way to add these as options myself? I know you can add links to the help system panel to control parts of the editor, but can you also add sliders or at least numeric input fields in order to create your own quick access controls? Perhaps even create different quick access panels for different types of projects. It is nice to have access to all options when you need them, but at the same time having to sift through all the options to find ones you actually use on a frequent basis frankly slows you down. For instance... when creating a new effect it is essential to have access to all the options, but once you've nailed that preset down you still may need to change stroke length and brush size in order to approximate the same look on a largely differently sized image. I do know about the "B"+drag option to resize, but it doesn't offer very good feedback to know how you have changed it. In many cases a method of changins some settings by a certain percent might be useful as well. If you know your image it 4 times as large as your original image you might want to simply increase the brush size and stroke length by 400% as an example. I know you could also just multiply by 4, but again I am just thinking of intuitive and hopefully easy time savers.
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We used to have the Pen Mode control up in the main tool bar when you were in paint synthesizer op mode. As opposed to hiding it in the Pen Mode control panel like it is now. That change happened in the switch from V3.5 to V4.
So it sounds like you woudl vote to go back to the old way, where adjusting the pen mode was at a higher level?
We do have new 2X, 1.5X, .75X, .5X resize macro edit commands in V5.
As a way to just press a command link to resize without having to do it manually or dig into the paint synthesizer.
I'm into adding as many new macro edits as people can thing up.
So feel free to suggest new ones that would be useful for different situations.
Again, a very under utilized part of Studio Artist that is extremely powerful and a great time saver.
i use them all the time.
By guide lines to aid automatic stroke direction, do you mean in some sense computing orientation from the current contents of the bezier path frame?
Or are you thinking of something different?
Craig had a similar suggestion a while back.
I can see the value of being able to hand specify stroke direction in different areas of the canvas. I would also love to see more ways to do this automatically (we already have orient lum texture etc). Topo follow for example. And maybe different intelligent regionalizers-- implied foreground background and horizon for starters.
part of the issue with the current stroke angle settings is that they are global based on the main parameter - yes there is slew and 2 mods but the underlying grid is global based on the initial setting. If for example the new facial recognition features could be used to allow faces to have different stroke vectors from the main parameter that might be interesting.
I will note that in exploring the sketching presets for Craig's challenge I did discover that there are ways to get a fair bit of control in the stroke hatching currently. Some of these parameters are buried but if you play long enough and dig deep enough you cant get quite good results. Part of the answer is not to try to do the entire canvas with a single preset. Mod the preset that you like to paint on only parts of the canvas based on what ever value parameter interests you-- texture for example- then you can control the stroke angle by these parametrized regions.
Of course for those with out the inclination to dig that deep, the ability to lay down regional "guiding" vectors would be awesome.
I guess path start regionize could have an additional feature that lets you use alternate region fill patterns, as opposed to just choosing one. Need to think about that more.
You could do it now via using masking or path start inhibition settings and 2 passes with different region fill settings for the different masked out areas. So you invert the mask or path inhibit settings for the second pass.
I'm always up for adding more automatic fill options. So suggest away.
By Topo do you mean like elevation lines on a topo map?
You could generate those contour lines via using the vectorizer i think to generate bezier paths. Or by embedding the Threshold ip op into a paint synthesizer preset in V5, where Threshold ip op was setup for contour thresholding.
But maybe i can improve on that? Will think about it.
And suggest away if you can think of other auto fill ideas.
Here's a thought which I believe is possible already. If I had a terrain model textured and rendered with a z-depth map... when painting the rendered image could be used to draw colors and shapes from, and the z-depth map...(not to be confused with the height map that generated the terrain) could be used to automatically adjust the brush size based on it's luminance value. This would allow for the automatic painting of a landscape with the brush size automatically growing or shrinking into the distance. or for simple images with obvious horizon lines you could use a simple gradient to influence brush sizing or other variables for that matter. Personally this isn't the first time where I thought having several slots for storing multiple source images might be useful. I suppose it's just semantics when you can specify a layer as a source, but organizationally being able to store several source images for a project still appeals to me though... for clarity if nothing else.
You could put the z-depth map image in a second layer, then setup the Bus modulation source to use that second layer, and then use Bus modulation for the size modulation if you want to modulate the size of the brush based on the depth map image.
You set the Bus modulation source in the Miscellaneous control panel in the paint synthesizer.