Comment by John Dalton Synthetik Software on January 22, 2010 at 9:45am

Here's a screen shot of the PASeq i used to generate this effect.

I started with a 100% brush size, and cut the size down by half for each subsequent auto paint step in the Brush Modulation control panel.

You could paint in the reduced size passes manually, focusing on parts of the canvas where you want to add additional detail with smaller brush sizes. IF you do this the source onion skin feature is useful, since turning it on allows you to see the source image transparently overlaid on top of the draw canvas.

Instead, i wanted to add additional smaller size movie brush images at the edges of the source image. So, i used the Texture Range controls in the Path Start control panel of the paint synthesizer.

For each smaller brush size pass i boosted the Texture Min setting. I started with 20, then used 40, then used 60, then used 100. By doing this i automatically apply progressively smaller images to progressively stronger edge locations in the source image. You can see this in the example photo mosaic image above.

There are other approaches you can use to adaptively size the component images in a photo mosaic built with the paint synthesizer. The adaptive block regionize path start generators are a totally different approach to doing this in a single paint step. The approach described here is useful for people who want to have a regular grid with variable sized images in the grid for building additional edge detail in the photo mosaic image.

Comment by John Dalton Synthetik Software on January 22, 2010 at 10:05am

Here's a studio artist 4 paint preset that implements the base preset i used in this example. I changed the movie brush to reference one of the demo movie brushes we include with version 4.
Grid Photo Mosaic Paint1.zip

Comment by John Dalton Synthetik Software on January 22, 2010 at 10:07am

To modify the preset below to use your own custom movie brush, you just import the preset and then run the File : Paint Synthesizer : New Movie Brush menu command. When you run the command you get a file dialog that lets you select a movie file. The selected movie file will become your new movie brush. You would then want to export the edited paint preset.

There's a tip you can read for more information on making your own custom movie brush from a folder of images.

Comment by chao on August 23, 2010 at 1:10am

I want to know which movie formats can become movie brush? Just mov? Or mp4, mpg etc? I try many movie formats to make movie brush, but failed. Studio artist always stop for a long time and then withdraw in surprise.

Comment by John Dalton Synthetik Software on August 23, 2010 at 9:02am

Any quicktime format you have a codec for on your computer should work as a movie brush.

Keep in mind that many of the movie files useable as a brush in studio artist are going to be sized in a way that makes sense for painting. So most of the demo movie brush files we provide int he brush folder may only have 64x64 pixel frame sizes, because we're using them as small brushes for painting.

Now you can use a much larger frame size if you wish, but you need to keep the overall memory usage of the file in mind. A half hour HD size movie file has a huge number of frames. So if studio artist tried to read them all into memory to buffer them for painting as movie brushes you will probably run out of memory. Which could lead to a crash or stall.

There are 2 different ways movie brushes can be loaded, based on the MB Load Status parameter in the Brush Source control panel (shown when you have a movie brush loaded). It can be set to PreLoad or Disk Draw.

PreLoad means that every frame in the movie is loaded into a 32bit ARGB frame buffer internal to the paint synthesizer. This is great for small brush frame sizes or brushes with larger frame sizes that have a few frames, because they paint from memory they will draw very quickly.

Disk Draw means that every frame is loaded from memory during drawing on demand. This uses much less memory, so any movie brush with a large frame size or many many frames needs to be setup this way.

Now where things get complicated is that many photo mosaic paint presets use the RGB Mapping MB Indexing parameter option. This frame indexing option requires that all of the movie brush frames are pre-analyzed to build a mapping index. This will also be true for the luminance or orientation MB Attribute Index options.

This intelligent frame pre-analysis to build mapping tables can take awhile if the frame sizes are larger and there are a large number of frames. So you can accidentally load a large movie brush and then think that the program is hung when it's actually just trying to do exactly what you told it to, analyze thousands of large frame images to build mapping tables.

In versions of studio artist prior to version 4, preload movie brushes were always analyzed. And disk draw brushes never were. So disk draw allowed for large movies to be used as movie brushes, but the RGB Mapping indexing no longer works properly. And Preload would always analyze, even if the indexing was set to not use a potential intelligent mapping index.

In Studio Artist 4 we tried to be smarter about this. We've gone through several iterations of trying to get it right. So depending on which version of 4 you are running the details of what happens vary slightly. Version 4.03 (being tested but still not released) has the best behavior.

When we were originally testing version 4 we noticed that some people would naively load any old movie file as a movie brush with the pre load option, and then wonder why the program crashed or seemed to hang. So, we put in an automatic option that looked at the number of frames and the frame size and automatically switched to Disk Draw load status to avoid these kinds of problems.

So then the program would not crash if someone loaded a half house HD movie file as a movie brush. But then we realized that RGB Indexing option didn't actually work for the disk draw option. For many photo mosaic movie brush applications you do want a large frame size, and these movie brushes were automatically being switched from preload to disk draw even though they would fit in memory.

So then we tried to make things smarter, so the mapping tables and the frame analysis associated with them would only be run if the appropriate frame indexing options were turned on.

It has taken several instances of incremental adjustment of how movie brushes are coded to come up with the right balance between allowing people to use large movie files when they want to while automaticall

Comment by chao on August 24, 2010 at 7:21pm

Thanks for your so many details.

Comment by chao yesterday

Hi, this is my mosaic drawing effect.  I want to know how can I restrict the cell aspect ratio（now the aspect ratio of cells are different，I want they are similar as the aspect ratio of source movie ）.  And I want to know how can I control the details on the picture(now the face is too rough). if I want to make the background rough and the face show more details in this mosaic picture, how can I do that?

Comment by chao yesterday

I found the blog article: 

Hand Painting Nested Sub-Blocks to Build Detail in a Regular Grid P...

The content is someting about this.  So if I want add some details mosaic, I can only do manual painting. Am I right?

Comment by chao yesterday

And the article finally said: "Here’s a previous post that discusses some automatic approaches to building adaptive block size photo mosaics using path start regionization features." But I can't find the post.  Could you show me taht or any other articles about building  adaptive block size photo mosaics?

Comment by John Dalton Synthetik Software yesterday

The blog entries that used to be at studioartist.posterous.com are no longer available on posterous. But you can access them as archived entries in the main blog at www.synthetik.com. For example, here's the set of blog posts tagged 'photo mosaic'. Here's the blog post on auto generation of nested sub blocks you were looking for.

Here's a tutorial post that points to a lot of other info on building mosaic effects. I'll try to put together a newer version of this info since some of it references posterous posts.

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