Creative Uses of Masked Movie Brushes

We've had a few technical support questions recently about working with masked movie brushes for creating photo mosaic effects, where you are working with irregular shaped objects on solid colored movie frames in the movie brush as opposed to rectangular movie frames. There's a studio artist daily effects blog post on April 23rd that will address this topic in detail, but i wanted to re-post an old studio artist 3.5 blog post on this topic below that many people might be unaware of.

One of the really cool features of Studio Artist is the ability to paint with a movie brush based on a collection of images.  We’ve discussed photo mosaic style effects using movie brushes before.  However, you can construct more elaborate movie brush paintings based on collections of masked objects.  This allows you to paint with multiple irregular shaped objects that are stored in the individual frames of the movie brush.

 

Here's a detailed view of the above image to show off what we mean by masked movie brushes.

 One approach to creating a movie brush with masked shapes is to use a movie with an embedded alpha channel.  The alpha channel for each frame can be used to define the shape of the object.  If you already have a collection of images that contain alpha masks this is an easy approach to use.  Or you could use Studio Artist Region Selection options or the Selective Color Matte Ip Op in a Paint Action Sequence (PASeq) to automatically generate an alpha channel for your collection of images if the individual objects are in front of a solid colored background.  You would use the Source Alpha Brush option for the Brush Type parameter in the paint synthesizer when constructing your movie brush preset if your movie brush has an embedded alpha channel for masking the brush.

 

The goal here is to use the embedded alpha channel in the movie brush to define the shape and Fill From - Fill To mix for generating paint nibs, while using the RGB brush image to build the Fill From portion of the paint nib.

 

Another approach is to define the masked area in each frame as pure white (255,255,255).  Studio Artist’s normal source brush masks out any portions of the brush that are pure white.  You want to use the Paint Fill Setup control panel Fill Option popup option called ‘From’ to generate a hard masked brush.  You would want the Fill From popup set to ‘Brush Image’ so that the non masked part of the movie brush image is passed through as the paint nib un-modified.

 

There are many different ways to colorize the individual movie brush images to more closely represent a specific paint color or to clone the main Studio Artist source image if that is what you are trying to do.  One approach is to use ‘RGB Mapping’ Frame Modulation in the Source Brush control panel.  This movie brush frame indexing is intelligent and tries to automatically choose the individual movie frame that most closely matches the color you are trying to paint with while you are drawing.

 

In the image example above i used a different coloring approach.  I used ‘Cycle Forward’ Frame Modulation because i wanted to sequentially index through all of the movie brush frame images for maximum visual diversity in the painting.  I use the Paint Fill Setup control panel Mod Type called ‘Mult Src Color’ with a Max Mod % of 80.  This colorizes the brush image that is being used for the fill.  

 

Using the Brush Load option for the Fill From parameter and doing the colorization in the Paint Brush Load control panel would be another option to colorize your movie brush images on the fly.  Any of the Mean Shift or Fixed Color mapping algorithms in the Paint Brush Load control panel will colorize the Source Brush.  You would want to use the Image Processing option for the Brush Load Type paramter with the Brush as the Source.

 

There were a daily effect blog posts on re-colorizing movie brushes if you want more information on this paint Brush Load control panel approach to colorizing a movie brush, which can be found here.

 

Check out the photo mosaic and movie brush tutorials on Studio Artist 3.5 tutorial disc #2 for more information on how to take a folder of images and convert them into a movie file you can use as a movie brush.  Remember, you can always use the Video training Guide pdf documentation to find a specific Studio Artist video tutorial.

 

Hopefully these tips will jump start your imagination regarding how you could personalize the Studio Artist movie brush capabilities to create custom object masked movie brush paint presets for your own artwork.  By customizing the movie brush imagery you could create an unlimited range of different visual styles to suit the mood you are trying to convey in your own paintings.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Replies

  • is it possible to rotate the nib by x90 degree?
    • You can also do things like modulate the brush orientation in different ways. Here's an example of modulating based on source image orientation.2472634608?profile=original2472634873?profile=original

       

    • I'm drawing with an Image Brush. I would like each step the nib to rotate 180 degrees.

      There's no sequential modulation, so I tried 360 Modulation but that didn't work.

      Is it possible to achieve sequential rotation with the image brush or I need to make a movie brush for that?

      Also please have a look at the attached image, there are imperfections between tiles with doesn't happen without orient modulation. I'm on win xp

       

      Fullscreen capture 642011 35512 PM.bmp.jpg

    • First, i tried working with your image on a windows machine as an image brush, and 90 and 180 degree orientation modulations via the Brush Modulation control panel worked perfectly for me. So i'm not sure what to say about that.

       

      There is a way to modulate the brush orientation via a temporal generator (TG1) which you can setup in the Miscellaneous control panel. So that might be one approach to get to where you want to go (having the source brush rotate 180 degrees for every application of a paint nib).

       

      There are also horizontal and vertical symmetry options for an image background texture. So you might be able to configure a preset to do what you want that way. That might be an easier approach.

       

      I'll try to put together a few tips on how to work with the background texture symmetry.

    • Here's some more information on the temporal generator orientation modulation approach mentioned above (including a paint preset example that uses the 2.jpg image panoart posted above as an image brush).
    • You can set an Orient Offset of 90 degrees in the Brush Modulation control panel. This will rotate the Brush Source with a 90 degree offset when it is used for drawing.
    • Thanks.

      Could you please check out this PASeq

      how do I get rid of the brush double pass on top and bottom?

       

      4step.pattern.triangle-sector.paseq

      2.jpg

    • I'm not sure what you mean by brush double pass. The AutoPaint step you have labeled as 200% is only set to draw at 100%? So maybe that's what you mean?

       

      In general, upsizing an image brush past 100% is not going to give you the best quality, Better to start with a larger image.

    • SA starts drawing the first raw then redraws it and then moves to the second one. Same for the last raw.
  • Here's a link to the June 1 daily effects blog post called Masked Movie Brush Photo Mosaic Effect. This was put together to try and respond to some of the questions that came up in the recent reply discussions on the tutorial post.

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