What paramater is causing these gray smudges?

[John W. Sledd]

Greetings all. I have "created" my first preset (by modifying an existing one) and have run into something that I cannot find the solution to. I believe I started with the Dry Oil preset and my goal was to keep the spacial distortion from that preset but without the color modification. I've gotten pretty close, but in light areas, I wind up with nasty gray areas as shown in the (hopefully) attached image. Can anyone shed some light on what parameter I need to tweak in order to get these to go away? Many thanks in advance. J.

SleddPaintProblem.jpg

[Synthetik]

If you want to post the preset file i can take a look at it.

[John W. Sledd]

Excellent, John. Thanks.

Sledd Background Painter

[Synthetik]

You need to archive compress any preset files you post. You control click the file in the finder and select the archice compress option in the contextural menus that come up. This is because preset files have a resource and data fork and only the data fork will get posted to the web if you don't archive compress the file.

[John W. Sledd]

Try this one;-)

Sledd Background Painter.zip

[Charles Floading]

Hi John,

Welcome to the addictive world of paint patch tweaking!

The distortion you like about this patch is caused by the settings in the Paint Source Offset panel.

Your color troubles flow (and I mean that it terms of "signal flow") from the Paint Brush Load panel. This is "wired" into the patch by way of the settings in Paint Fill Setup. In this panel you'll see that the Mod Type (modifier type) pop-up is set to Mult Brush Load. This means that the paint synthesizer will mix in whatever the Paint Brush Load panel is doing. In this case it will use the "multiply" operation when it does the mix.

To solve your color problems in the most simple way, I would just say switch the Mod Type pop-up to "none."

Keep reading if you're interested in how things work.
Look at your Paint Fill Setup panel now. The only thing it's painting with (filling from and filling to) is the source image. You're getting some smuzzing up thanks to two other panels. 1) the paint source offset panel already mentioned, and 2) the Brush Type panel. What Brush Type is doing for you is creating that texture. It's acting like a mask, holding back some of the paint.

For fun, try tweaking these parameters,
In the Brush Type panel play with the Clip slider.
In Paint Source Offset, the offset slider will most clearly show off the effect of this patch. A little goes a long way.

Incidentally, the color problems you were seeing came from the fact that when the Paint Brush Load panel was multiplied and mixed in, it was inverting the canvas and processing that with the max operation. Just a hunch, but I think that if the patch painted over one section of a blank canvas, then painted over that same section again, on the second pass, the canvas would no longer be blank and would be your source (since that's what the Fill From pop-ups are using in the paint brush setup panel) only inverted. Source + inverted source = strangeness.

Hope that helps!

Best,
Chuck

[John W. Sledd]

Wonderful write-up, Chuck. Thank you so much. I shall get in there shortly and put this new info to work. And yes, I do want to know how things work so thanks for taking the extra time on the extra info.

I'll report back soon.

J.

[John W. Sledd]

Success! Many thanks for the direction, Chuck.

While in there experimenting with the Paint Fill Apply, I also succeeded in softening the graininess of the strokes, which was a slight irritation for me.

Wow. I actually did something...on purpose. Only 3 billion more things to learn about this app;-)

J.

[Charles Floading]

Hi John,
I was playing around with presets and was reminded of you when I came across the attached paint patch. It uses MSG from Evolver to do something similar to what you were doing with the paint patch you posted here. Although, rather than displace, this patch does a complicated "summing up" of the source image before drawing it to canvas.
It's Tilt Sensitive. You can Auto Paint with it, or use a regular mouse, but it's really wired to take advantage of the tilt of the pen in a graphics tablet.
Uses MSG via Paint Brush Load which is the "Fill From" in Paint Fill Set Up.
Paints continuously. In Pen Mode, the Scan Spacing is set to zero, so the mouse has to travel zero pixels before the brush image updates.

Best,
Chuck

MSG Max Bin interactive.zip

[Synthetik]

Using the pen tilt with this one is an effective way to bring in some original source image detail for things like facial features (eyes, mouth, etc).

It's funny, i tend to focus on using MSG in Evolver to create procedural artwork, but there are a billion unexplored possibilities available using MSG presets in paint synthesizer patches or as components in Paint Action Sequences. I think MSG in the paint synth or in PASeq's and the Movie Pixel Index Background Textures in the paint synth are 2 mostly unexplored Studio Artist features, each of which has an infinite range of potential uses.

[John W. Sledd]

Hey guys. Thanks for this. I've been playing with some of the pen tilt patches with the idea of using it for things like explosion or exhaust type of effects. I had not considered it in this way. Cool.

J.