Creative Uses of Masked Movie Brushes

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

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.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

Here's the link to the daily effects blog post on 'Working with Non-Rectangular Shapes in Photo Mosaic Effects' i mentioned above.

 

More Information on Building Different Photo Mosaic Effects Using Studio Artist

If you are interested in more information on different kinds of photo mosaic effects you can create with Studio Artist, there's a lot of different information resources available online. I will list some of them below to serve as a reference for access to all of this varied on-line information.

 

The Studio Artist News blog has posted many articles on photo mosaic imagery over the years. The word 'mosaic' is used very loosely, since you can generate all kinds of different effects that go beyond a traditional rectangular photo mosaic approach. the block sizes can be adaptive, or irregular, or object masked as in the discussion above, or based on using the vectorizer.

 

Creating Photo Mosaic effects in Studio Artist involve working with a movie brush. A movie file is generated where each individual movie frame is a different image in the collection of sub images you want to use to arrange to represent a larger image. That movie file is then loaded as a movie source brush into the paint synthesizer. Alternatively, you could use a movie background texture as an alternative approach in the paint synthesizer.

Here's a tip post on Making a Movie Brush to Create a Photo Mosaic.

Here's another post focused on Building Your Own Custom Movie Brush for Photo Mosaic Effects.

 

One key to creating successful photo mosaic imagery is putting together a suitable collection of sub images, where the varying colorings of the set of sub images has enough diversity to successfully represent the larger image you want to use them to reproduce. You can also be very clever with choosing imagery related to different themes, or artistic categories of aesthetic looks, which work to build interesting effects when combined together in the larger mosaic image.

 

An alternative approach to building a suitable set of internal colorings for your movie brush is to colorize the movie brush frames while you are painting the mosaic. Here's a post that focuses on some techniques you can use for movie brush re-colorization.

 

There have been a large number of daily effect blog posts that talk about different ways to work with movie brushes.

 

Many people are interested in duplicating the look of the wildly popular Studio Artist photo mosaic work generated by artist Charis Tsevis. To duplicate his style of sub-nested adaptive mosaic blocks, they are interested in working with grid tiling and nested sub blocks within the mosaic grid to generate detail at edge and feature areas of the larger image the adaptive mosaic is trying to reproduce. There are approaches you can use to build sub-nested tiled grids automatically to build detail in a tiled photo mosaic. Charis is a member of the Studio Artist User Forum if you wish to communicate with him directly, or follow the links on his user page to more of his amazing Studio Artist generated artwork.

 

Here's a post on irregularly deformed photo mosaic tilings, where the mosaic looks more like it was hand tiled.

 

Studio Artist 3.5 shipped with a separate MSG editing application called MSG Evolver. It featured something called the ArtMapper that allowed for creation of all kinds of interesting photo mosaic effects. MSG editing and evolution features have been directly built into Studio Artist 4, so we discontinued the development of the older MSG Evolver application. You can use MSG in conjunction with the paint synthesizer to emulate most if not all of the old Art Mapper effects. This tip talks about how to Simulate the MSG Evolver Art Mapper in version 4.

 

MSG Evolver also allowed for making movie mosaics, where you could build a dynamic moving photo mosaic from a collection of movie files. So the final mosaic was an actual movie, where all of the individual sub elements played back as movie files as the larger movie played. You can build effects like this in version 4 by using 2D frame indexing in your movie brush. You make a single larger movie brush that is composed of a series of different individual movie files edited back to back in a series in the larger main movie brush file. Each of the individual sub movies needs to be the same number of frame sin length. You can then use 2D frame indexing to map the individual movies appropriately to build a photo mosaic representation using one axis of the frame modulation while using the other axis of the frame modulation to time index through the sub movie. Here's an old forum discussion thread that talks about how to do this.

 

Movie brushes can be used for many more visual effect and paint styles styles than just photo mosaic imagery. Here's a post that talks about using movie brushes as background textures to add visual complexity to a source brush paint preset.

 

One exciting use of movie background textures is the Movie Pixel Index Background Texture, which can use a movie brush to build a set of hatching patterns for building tone in an image. This tip includes a section on Movie Pixel Background Textures. Here's a post that gets into the details of building a movie background texture hatching preset for building custom hatching patterns for building tone for paint presets.

 

 

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

We uncovered a bug associated with nested tiling using the paint synthesizer on Windows in version 4.03. The issue is fixed in 4.04 beta builds, and will be released to the general Windows user population when we release the version 4.04 update. If you are a Windows Studio Artist user running 4.03 and need to use the above mentioned presets associated with nested sub blocks prior to the official 4.04 update release, you can contact techsupport AT synthetik DOT com and request a 4.04 beta build.

 

This issue only affects Windows Studio Artist users, the nested sub block presets mentioned above work fine on the Mac in version 4.03.

[Saša S]

Hello John,

I've been trying to create a movie brush with embedded alpha. I read this post and this one at least 5 times, but all i managed to do is the attached movie. 

It doesn't seem possible to create alpha embedded movie brush with images other than JPG which doesn't support embedded alpha. %*(

It would be much more user friendly if instead of creating a movie brush I could just point SA to the folder with EPS or TIFF images with embedded alpha

 

I very much appreciate a short answer. I'm not a native speaker and it takes me hours just to read long posts.

 

Thanks a lot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

You just need to insure you use a movie compression codec that supports embedded alpha. You can create a movie with an embedded alpha channel using the Animation codec with Millions of Colors+ for the Depth setting.

The Embedded Alpha movie preference setting determines what the embedded alpha channel is set to in the rendered output movie file. So you need to build your processing PASeq appropriately depending on what you set that preference setting to for the source for the alpha channel for the output movie file.

Here's a tip that describes Generating a Movie with an Embedded Alpha Channel in more detail.

 

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

You can use Studio Artist to convert a folder of tiff images with embedded alpha channels in them into a movie file with embedded alpha.

 

You should use the Animation codec with Millions of Colors+ for the Depth setting for your movie file output. You build a one step PASeq that erases the canvas to the Source Image.

 

And you setup the Embedded Alpha movie preference setting to use the Source Alpha option.

 

The you run Action : Process with Paint Action Sequence : Image to Movie menu command. 

[Saša S]

I've created a movie brush with embedded alpha, and used it in the paint preset. 

how do I get rid of the black matting and why is it there in the first place?

 

Thanks

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

I'm not able to open the coffee.brush.alpha movie file on a mac. So i can't look at it or try it out right now.  Did you generate it on windows? If so, try opening it in Quicktime Player and then exporting it. That should enable it to be cross platform. You could then repost it.

 

In looking at the paint preset you posted, my guess is that the objects in the alpha matted movie file have dark edges.  How did you generate the alpha matted movie file?

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

When you generate a movie file from Studio Artist on windows, it generates 2 output files, the main movie file and a resource file with the same name. When you open the main movie file in Quicktime Player it actually reads both files. If you zip compress both of them in a folder and post that i can look at it on windows. But i need both files to do that.

 

The other option is to export a copy of the movie from Quicktime Player like i said above. That will generate a single cross platform movie file.

[Saša S]

in order to generate the movie brush I used this tip

and settings you mentioned in this thread

I've also attahed my .tif images I generated the brush from 

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

I looked at the Brush images you posted that you said you used to generate the movie file. If you look at the actual RGB channels with alpha view off, the object images are placed on a black background. So the black fringing you are seeing is associated with that. The alpha masks you generated are fading from full on to full off at the edges of the objects, and that transition is including some of the original black background when the alpha matted object is displayed.

 

If you goal is to paint the objects in on top of a white background, then when you do your original alpha mask generation for the images, make sure that they are actually on a white background. You could also try contracting the alpha mask a little so the mask on part of the image doesn't include any of the background color in it.

 

Were your objects pre-masked, or did you create the masks yourself. And if so, how?

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

Here's a post that discusses in more detail why you might see a fringing effect and how to get rid of it. The post discusses a white fringe, but the same discussion applies to your situation, you just have objects on a black background as opposed to a white background.

[Saša S]

please see attached PSD file.

as you can see the pics look good on any background..

I created source files for the brush saving individual layers as .tif