Why does this brush stop?

[Dennis Miller]

Can someone (John?) tell me why this brush stops drawing so soon when I hit Action? I'd like it to go on relatively indefinitely, or at least up to the point of the Path Start setting. Thanks much. Dennis

stopper.zip

[Synthetik]

Well, there are a number of logical inconsistencies in this particular paint preset as it is currently edited.

First off, you are using adaptive block regionize path start generator, so it's only going to do one pass through the image and stop. If you want it to draw indefinitely then you would need to not be using one of the regionize or grid scan path start generators.

You also had a bunch of things turned on in path end that would prevent drawing in many cases. You have selection region and local region path stop set. You are forcing the path length. And you have paint color luminance visual error path end turned on, which will also inhibit drawing if it thinks the stroke is going to increase the visual error between what is already on the canvas and the source image.

So i would turn off the visual error path end setting (set to none), and i would uncheck the select region and local region path stops and the force path length checkbox as well in path end. And i would change the path start generator to something like clumpy random or smooth random, etc.

you also have a skip blanking inhibitor turned on in path start. so pretty quickly you will fill up the blanking buffer and it stops drawing since that is what you are telling it to do. So you should set the path start inhibitor to none as well.

after you make all these edits it will draw for 25,000 regions (your max strokes setting) before it stops.

Page 499 in the studio artist user guide has a troubleshooting section called 'the program doesn't seem to be drawing'. i'm pasting that text here below.

.............
The program doesn't seem to be drawing.

The key to a problem of this nature is to logically work through your current Studio Artist interface settings and current Paint Patch parameter settings to determine why drawing isn't taking place. Or perhaps drawing is taking place but you just aren't seeing it.

For example, you may have Layer Alpha view On, but have alpha drawing turned off in the Layers preference dialog. If this was the case, your paint strokes would not be drawing into the layer alpha channel, so you would not see the rgb channels draw when alpha view was turned on.

Another potential problem could be specifying a paint patch that is logically inconsistent. There are a number of possible ways to do this.

Here are some scenarios to watch out for.

Check to make sure you don't have a region mask specified as a part of the paint patch. If you do, it will only draw or image process within the mask region (i.e.. the white part).

Check the Paint Fill Setup parameter pane. Make sure you don't have the Paint Fill settings Fill From and Fill To both set to Canvas Image. If you do, this will just repaint the Canvas Image back onto itself.

Check to make sure the maximum brush size (located in the Brush Modulation parameter pane) isn't set to 0 or very low. If the brush size is pressure modulated and you are using a mouse, make sure the Autodraw Pressure Range
(located in the Miscellaneous parameter pane) isn't set to 0.

Check the Paint Fill parameters. For example, if you have a black background and you are using a Composite setting of Min, then nothing will draw because the black background is as minimum as it can get. Same thing for a white
background and a Composite setting of Max.

Check your Path Start and Path End parameters carefully. You may have set them up in a way that is prohibiting you from drawing. For example, if the canvas is all black and you have the Path Start control panel config-
ured to only start paths in white areas, you will never get a new path when autodrawing.

If you run into situations where drawing does not seem to be occurring, here are a series of steps you can try to debug what is going on.

First, are you in an Operation mode that supports drawing? For example, Paint Synthesizer does support drawing, but Image Processing does not.

Second, try working with the Layer window video settings to see if you have something set up there that is blocking you from seeing the layer drawing.

Third, try a different preset to see if the problem is internal to the editable
parameters in a particular preset. If that is the case, you can then try to work through the various control panels to debug the problem.

[Dennis Miller]

Thanks John. Very usefl stuff there. To take it a step further (with the mods), how can I adjust the speed at which the screen fills up - the individual stroke rate? So it would take, say 1 minute to write out 1000 starts as opposd to 5 seconds.
Thanks again.
Best
D.

clumpy thin bars.zip

[Synthetik]

Painting speed is a function of what you are doing in a particular paint patch and what machine you are running it on. There's no control that says paint faster or paint slower, perhaps as machines get more powerful something like this will be added, but often we're pushing the envelop in terms of trying to use as much cpu horsepower as possible in the paint engine.

In general you can speed up an individual paint preset by increasing the spacing in path application. Although if you are using region fill as draw pen mode that's not going to do anything for you since the spacing controls the spacing of individual paint nibs on a path and region fill as brush is not drawing with nibs of paint on paths but drawing a region based off of the path. So if you had normal paint strokes then decreasing the spacing would slow down drawing of the individual paint strokes.

Some brush types (geodesic source brush for example) and some brush load settings are computationally intensive so making those choices will slow down the drawing speed. But as i said there's no one control that says, 10 paint strokes per second, or 100, or whatever, and a control like that is not really going to make sense until everything you would want to do runs so fast on a super powerful cpu that we would want to throttle he speed of painting. Unless you feel we have crossed that threshold and you do want a control that throttles the speed of drawing? If so let me know.

Now if you are referring to the speed of playback from a movie stream you used autowrite to write out frames as studio artist is drawing in real time, then there are 2 components to the final perceptual paint speed observed in that output movie stream. the actual frame rate the movie stream will play back at is set in your movie compression preferences. the rate that you set for autowrite is the rate that you output frames into the stream in real time, not the playback rate (which as i said is determined in the movie compression fps). But decreasing the movie stream autowrite rate will increase the perception of speed in the final movie. This may at first seem counter intuitive, but if you think about it by decreasing the speed of the autowrite rate you are allowing more painting to happen in real time before a frame is dumped out, so when that stream is played back at a fixed rate the painting will appear to happen faster in the movie playback. Typically you want a fixed fps for the movie playback anyway, so fiddling with the autowrite rate is how you can adjust the perceptual speed of the painting in the final movie stream playback.

[Dennis Miller]

Hey John. Here's another example where I would like to slow down the onset of strokes, or at leaast slow the blinking effect that is created within each rectangle. I'm after a controllale speed here as well as a very smooth transition between the colors within each square - the blink effect is a bit out of control. I'd also like all new squares to stay within the canvas - they ofen float off the edge.
Are there any parameters that ou might recommend tweaking?
Thanks for the help.
best,
d.

FAST BRIGHT RECT.zip

[Synthetik]

You can turn off the path randomization to reduce the jitter. The multiple path starts at the same location are still going to lead to a strobing effect because of what is going on in the brush load you have setup. You're applying 500 applications of the brush at a specific location since your path start repeat is set to 500, and each of those brush applications takes what is in the canvas in the brush area and changes it, hence the strobing.

You could setup a rectangular region selection and then turn on the Select Region Path Stop checkbox in Path End control panel in the paint synthesizer to keep the drawing from getting close to the edges. You don't need masking on to do this, it still keys off of what the current region selection is for the layer.

[Dennis Miller]

Thanks John. I'll check that out. Also, in this preset, is there a way to make the rectangles continue to flash and appear animated while a new one starts up? I'd like the whole screen to gradually fill up with animated squares, sort of like a video wall... Any thoughts on that?
Best,
d.

[Synthetik]

You'd need to switch from the region fill as brush pen mode to particle paint pen mode and then setup a large rectangular source brush. Here's a quick example of how you would edit the preset.

fastBrightRect1.zip