If you look at the factory paint synthesizer presets that ship with Studio Artist V5.5 you will notice that the top 3 Collections are organized as shown below
So you can see those first 3 Collections are organized to showcase Auto Painting, Assisted Painting, and Manual Painting.
Now you aren't restricted by that organization, you can try to manually paint with any of the AutoPaint presets, or auto paint with any of the Manual paint presets.
Auto Painting is when you use the Action button to start a fully automatic paint effect in Studio Artist's paint synthesizer. You can also use the Action : Do Current Action menu command with it's associated cmnd r menu hotkey shortcut. You can stop automatic painting at any point by pressing the spacebar.
Manual painting is the more conventional digital painting process where you use the mouse or pen movement to simulate conventional drawing on the computer screen. Manual painting is much more fluid and expressively controlable if you are using a pressure and tilt sensitive pen like a wacom tablet or the windows surface pen. This is because you can use things like interactive pen pressure, tilt, tilt orientation, barrel axis rotation to modulate different editable parameters associated with the visual appearance of the digital paint process in the Studio Artist paint synthesizer. Simple examples of paint parameter modulation could be modulating the size of the paint brush, or the opacity or mix of the paint nib being applied onto the surface of your canvas.
Studio Artist offers a lot of additional modulation options for adjusting the digital paint that can be thought of as a type of 'assistance' if you are working with a mouse, since a normal mouse offers no real interactively other than it's movement on the canvas. This could include different procedural modulators as well as 'intelligent' modulation options that can adjust the associated modulated paint parameters based on some source image based visual feature modeled by the paint synthesizer.
Assisted painting can be thought of as sitting between the 2 extremes of manual painting and fully automatic painting. Just like manual painting, the artist is directing the painting process by their interactive use of the mouse or pen. But at the same time, fully automatic processes are also going on at the same time. Some of the assistance could be in the form of the various smart modulation options i just discused that could aid working with a manual paint preset and the interactive expression limited computer mouse. But at the same time the full range of features available in the paint synthesizer's auto paint engine can also be used to assist the artist directing the manual painting. This is what we call 'assisted painting'.
One way to think about assisted painting is to imagine a little motor or robot attached to the end of the digital paint brush. So the human artist might be moving the end of the digital brush around the canvas, but the actual digital paint is at the same time being directed and moved around by that imaginary motor or robot hanging onto the end of the paint brush. So the human artist and the paint synthesizer are working together to create the actual paint effect applied to the canvas.
If the human artist knows how to paint and draw, then this assisted painting process can be thought of as a way to speed up your work, or to create unique visual effects. So complex and tedious hatching shading effects for example could be knocked out very quickly. But if the human artist hasn't taken years to develop the motor skills required for detailed drawing, the paint synthesizer's assistance can aid them in creating something interesting. Assistance is also a fun way to stimulate creativity, to lead you in new creative directions, etc. In other traditional digital paint programs, the user has to initiate all of the work to create something. That is not the case in Studio Artist. Things like assisted painting mean that things can visually happen without you directly having to make them happen.
Lets take a look at the first factory paint preset in the Assisted Painting preset collection. The one in the General Examples category called 'Acrylic Blend Dry Brush'. If i select that paint preset, and then press the action button to let it auto paint for a few seconds, and then press the space bar to stop painting, i get something like the screen shot below.
Note that the auto paint process for this particular preset is slowly working to fill in the entire canvas. At the same time, this particular preset was not specifically programmed to be a fully optimized automatic paint preset, so getting full canvas coverage might take awhile. You can note how the eyes and ear areas of the canvas don't have any paint in them yet.
Now lets erase the canvas back to white and manually paint in the facial area of the canvas using assisted painting. I moused down in the canvas area associated with the face, wiggled the mouse around for a few seconds while continuing to hold the mouse cursor down, very quickly roughed in a painting of the facial in a few seconds, and then release the mouse.
Again, this whole process when working with assisted painting only took a few seconds. And i was directly involved with directing where i wanted the assisted painting process to occur. But the actual paint application to the canvas was assisted by the paint synthesizers automatic painting algorithms (as configured for this particular paint preset in the Editor). if i had fully painted each individual assisted paint stroke manually, it would have taken me way longer to do all of the individual paint strokes that were generated in a few seconds of assisted painting.
The paint synthesizer has a number of editable different Pen Modes. If we switch to the Editor, we can see (and adjust if we wish) the different editable parameter settings associated with this paint preset.
If you look in the Pen Mode control panel in the Editor for the 'Acrylic Blend Dry Brush' assisted paint preset we are working with, you can see that the Pen Mode is set to the Autodraw Interactive option.
Try changing the Pen Mode to Interactive pen. then erase the canvas to white, and draw a few manual paint strokes. As you can see in the screenshot below, the behavior and appearance is now very different than it was before when working with with preset in Autodraw Interactive pen mode.
Remember, in my previous assisted drawing screen shot using this paint preset with Autodraw Interactive pen mode, from my perspective i only painted one paint stroke (moused down once, move the mouse around a little bit on the facial are, release the mouse). In the screen shot below using Interative Pen for the Pen Mode, i manually painted 5 paint strokes. This took about the same amount of time as it took to do my complete assisted drawing painting of the face. So you can see the power (both speed up and expressive Interactive) of working with assisted drawing.
At the same time, there is some additional intelligent assistance going on above in the manual painting while using Interactive Pen mode. Note how the size of the paint brush is being dynamically adjusted as i manually painted. If you change the Editor to show the Brush Modulation control panel, you can see how this dynamic brush size modulation is defined for this particular paint preset.
Note that the Size Modulation parameter is set to Color Range At Radius. So the paint synthesizer is dynamically adjusting the brush size based on the difference between the source image color reference at the start point of the paint stroke and the source image color reference at the current drawing location of the paint stroke as the stroke is being painted. The brush size is modulated between a minimum size of 9% and a maximum size of 100%, where 100% corresponds to the specific brush size in pixels defined for the brush in the Brush Source control panel (64 pixels for this preset).
Try making the ColorRange a lot bigger and see what happens when you paint. Try changing the Size Modulation to a different option and see what happens. try setting it to None and notice how the brush size is not dynamically modulated when you manually paint.
In this quick introduction to assisted painting, we took a look at three different kinds of Studio Artist painting. Fully automatic painting, assisted painting, and manual painting. We took a more in depth look at one particular factory assisted paint preset to try and understand how it works internally based on parameter options in the Editor. We focused on 2 different kinds of intelligent assistance being used in that paint preset, the Autodraw Interactive pen mode, and source color based brush size modulation.
I'll continue this assisted drawing discussion in additional posts to this thread.
For more information about Pen Modes, check out this tip.
For more information about adjusting the brush size, check out this tip.
Replies
Let's continue our exploration of 'assisted drawing' by taking a more in-depth look at the Editor settings for the 'Acrylic Blend Dry Brush' paint synthesizer preset we focused on in the first segment of this post thread. By adjusting those Editor settings, we can change the way assisted paint paths are generated, and subsequently change its visual appearance when applied to the canvas.
In our previous discussion, we showed how the Autodraw Interactive pen mode used in this assisted drawing paint preset allows the paint synthesizer automatic drawing settings to be embedded into the paint brush. So that when you manually paint with the assisted painting preset, the automatic painting actions associated with the preset are being run locally at the tip of the digital paint brush. This is the way the Autodraw Interactive pen mode works (auto drawing takes place as you manually work with the pen).
But what defines the appearance of the paint paths generated by this Autodraw Interactive pen mode automatic painting?
You may recall from previous discussions of the paint synthesizer that the automatic painting process can be thought of as being generated by the following set of steps.
1: Start locations for painting are generated. Normally defined by the Path Start control panel for fully automatic painting, but for assisted painting the location of the pen determines the start locations for the assisted painting.
2: A paint path is derived off of the start location. The shape and extent of the automatically generated paint path is determined by the parameter settings in the Path Start and Path Angle control panels.
If you play with the Acrylic Blend Dry Brush paint preset being examined in this post, you will notice that the automatic painting tracks the local curvature inherent in the source image you are working off of. If we take a look at the Path Shape control panel, we can see it is setup as shown below.
Note that the Path Type is set to Curved.
Try changing the Path Type to Line instead. If you perform assisted drawing now, you can see how the previous automatically generated curved paths have changed to straight line paths.
Notice how the assisted painting tracks the editing changes you make within the Path Shape control panel.
Try increasing or decreasing the Max Path Length. Note how the automatically generated assisted paint path drawing adjusts accordingly.
Try changing the path Type to Spiral Ellipse and the Max Path length to 1200 and notice how the appearance of the assisted drawing changes.
The parameter settings in the path Angle control panel also effect the appearance of the automatically generated assisted drawing paths.
Try reloading the original 'Acrylic Blend Dry Brush' paint preset, goto the Path Angle control panel, and change the Path Angle from Orient to Fixed. Note how the appearance of the automatically generated paint paths changes accordingly. They are all straight line horizontal paths now.
Try changing the Angle Offset to 90 degrees. What happens to the assisted drawing paint paths when you do that?
Try out some different Path Angle settings (Lum, Uniform Random, Fixed Hatch, etc). Try and get a feel for the characteristic appearance of the different path Type options.
Reload the original unedited paint preset again.
Now goto the Path Randomize control panel. Try some different randomization options in there and note what happens to the automatically generated assisted drawing paths.
I cut back the maximum brush size modulation to 50% in the brush Modulation control panel in my example above to make it a little bit easier to see the effect of the Path Randomization options shown above.
Assisted painting via working with Autodraw Interactive pen mode automatically generates new assisted drawing paint paths as you move the pen or mouse cursor. How often new paths are drawn as the cursor moves can be adjusted in the Pen Mode control panel. You can do this by adjusting the Scan Spacing parameter. The original preset we are working with uses a Scan Spacing setting of 10. This means that every time the pen cursor moves a distance of 10 pixels a new automatic assisted path is drawn from the tip of the moving cursor. in the screen shot below i moved the pen cursor horizontally 3 different times, with a Scan Spacing of 10, 30, and 90 . Note how the spacing of the auto-generated assisted drawing paint paths increases as i move from the top (Scan Spacing of 10) to the middle (Scan Spacing of 30) to the bottom (Scan Spacing of 90).
Note how everything we have been doing as far as the editing process goes has only effected the visual appearance of the generated paint paths. While not effecting the visual appearance of the digital paint applied to the generated paint paths. The control panels of the paint synthesizer are setup to modularize the appearance of the automatic path drawing from the appearance of the digital paint applied to the automatically generated paths.
The paint synthesizer has integral memories you can use to save and restore editing settings while working. You can access these working memories via menu commands shown below, or via the memory buttons located at the bottom of the paint synthesizer Editor. Patch Memories store all of the paint synthesizer Editor settings. Path memories only store the parameters associated with automatic path generation. Brush Memories only store the parameters associated with the appearance of the digital paint applied to the generated path.
You can use the Path and Brush Memories to mix and match different automatic path generation settings in one preset with the digital paint appearance in a different preset. Load the paint preset that has the path drawing you like, then record it into a path memory. Then load the paint preset that has the paint appearance you like, and then playback the recorded path memory to put all of the recorded path parameter settings into the second preset you liked the paint appearance of.
In this post on assisted drawing using Autodraw Interactive pen mode, we showed how we can change the visual appearance of the automatically generated assisted drawing paint paths by adjusting the different editable paint synthesizer parameter settings in the every time Shape, Path Angle, and Path Randomization control panels. We also showed how we could adjust the spacing of the assisted drawing paths emanating from the moving cursor tip by adjusting the Scan Spacing in the pen Mode control panel.
For an overview of how the paint synthesizer works, check out this tip on Understanding the Paint Synthesizer.
For more information on editing the paint synthesizer, check out this tip on Constraining the Paint Synthesizer.
This is super helpful and highlights a number of aspects I knew little about. Thank you!
We've previously been discussing how the Autodraw Interactive pen mode in the Studio Artist paint synthesizer can be used to perform a kind of assisted drawing that adds an auto-drawing component to interactive painting.
But if you look at the different options in the Pen Mode control panel for the adjustable Pen Mode parameter as shown below, there are actually 3 different flavors of Autodraw available. They are Autodraw Interactive, Autodraw MultiPen, and Auto Region Fill as Brush.
These 3 different autodraw options correspond to adding autodraw assistance to interactive pen drawing, multipen drawing, and region fill as brush drawing.
When you manually draw a path with Interactive Pen, you get a single path drawn from the movement of the cursor. But when you draw with Interactive Multipen pen mode, you get multiple virtual paint paths being drawn simultaneously from the pen or mouse movement.
How the multiple paths are oriented spatially in relationship to the moving pen tip is a function of how the adjustable controls are setup in the MultiPen Mode control panel. I modified the 'Acrylic Blend Dry Brush' factory assisted drawing preset we used in the previous posts to this thread to better show off assisted drawing using Autodraw Interactive Multipen pen mode. I also turned off the brush size modulation and set the max brush size to a smaller setting to bette see the individual multipens as they draw. The zip compressed modified Assisted-Draw MultiPen 1 paint preset is attached below.
Assisted-Draw MultiPen 1.zip
To generate the screenshot below, i started with the modified paint preset attached above and moved the pen cursor horizontally for a single pass 4 times using 4 different pen modes. From top to bottom, they are Interactive Pen, Autodraw Interactive, Interactive MultiPen, and Autodraw MultiPen.
Note how the MultiPen options are painting with 5 different paint nibs associated with a single manually drawn paint path. These 5 virtual paint paths are computed on the fly as the drawing occurs. So if you record a single paint path being drawn with a MultiPen preset, the path you drew is recorded in the PASeq action step, but when it is played back, that recorded manually movement is used to dynamically recreate the 5 virtual paint paths associated with the actual MultiPen painting you see applied to the canvas.
You can think of MultiPen pen mode as being a specific kind of assisted drawing if you want, since it can be used as an additional automatic manipulation of the paint path you are generating. Or you can think of it as attaching a secondary robotic manipulator to the pen tip if you want to think of it that way. or you could think of it as a simulation of multiple brush bristles arranged in some spatial positioning being dragged on the canvas as you move the pen. When we originally conceived it, we were thinking of it as a way to simulate canvas brush bristles, but like many things in the paint synthesizer, you can tweak it to do other things as well.
By adjusting the different user parameters in the MultiPen Mode control panel, you can dramatically change the visual appearance of the attached paint preset above. Try a few experiments, changing different parameters in that MultiPen Mode control panel and see how they change the visual appearance of the paint preset when you work with it.
Region Fill as Brush pen modes work very differently than the more conventional pen modes like Interactive pen or MultiPen. The more conventional pen modes work by painting a series of individual paint nibs laid down along the generated paint path. Digital paint is applied to the generated source brush, and then that is ap[plied to the canvas as you draw the path.
But in Region Fill as Brush pen mode, the paint path is used to generate a one time virtual source brush. So a single paint nib in the shape of the complete drawn path is laid down after you finish drawing the path. Interactive Region Fill as Brush pen mode works in a similar way to the other InteractiveDraw pen modes, in that the automatic drawing features are used to generate a series of automatically drawn paint paths as you move the cursor while drawing in that pen mode. But these automatically drawn paint paths are used to build individual virtual region fill as brush source brush paint nibs.
The screenshot below shows the difference between Region Fill as Brush and Interactive Region Fill as Brush pen modes. A single slightly curved horizontal curve is drawn for each of the 2 pen modes (think the top part of a big circle).
So each of the individual painted shapes above (the regions) were created with a complete individual paint path.
We covered 3 different approaches to painting associated with different pen modes, and the Autodraw Interactive variations of them in this post. In the next post, we'll discuss Particle Pen pen mode, which is a different approach to assisted drawing we have not yet discussed.
You may have noticed that there are a few additional 'Autodraw' labeled options for the different AutoDraw Pen Modes previously discussed that you can choose in the paint synthesizer. They are the ones labeled 'FreeStyle'. They are basically the same as their non FreeStyle equivalents, except that they do their live painting at the completion of an initial temporary freestyle path drawing specified by the users movement of the pen or mouse cursor.
So FreeStyle Autodraw is essentially the same as Autodraw Interactive, except that when using the freestyle option you first draw an initial red user freestyle path, and then after you release the mouse or raise the pen cursor the actual paint auto drawing takes place along the positioning of the temporary red freestyle path you specified with your cursor movement. The red freestyle path the user specified is temporary, so it goes away when the actual painting occurs along it.
You can see what i mean by this in the auto drawing below. The top red temporary user defined path is show at the top of the canvas (a single horizontal user defined freestyle path), and what you get painted with a single horizontal freestyle path when working in FreeStyle Autodraw pen mode is shown below.
The FreeStyle equivalent pairs for various pen modes we previously discussed in this thread are listed below.
Interactive Pen - FreeStyle
Autodraw Interactive - Freestyle Autodraw
Interactive Multipen - FreeStyle MultiPen
Autodraw MultiPen - FreeStyle Autodraw MultiPen
Auto Region Fill as Brush - FreeStyle Auto Region Fill as Brush
One nice thing about the different FreeStyle pen modes is that you can use hot keys to manipulate the temporary red freestyle user path before releasing the mouse and getting the actual painting occurring along the temporary freestyle path you specified. You can use the t hotkey to translate the existing red freestyle path, or the r hotkey to rotate it.
Another assisted drawing pen mode option we haven't yet discussed in detail is Particle Paint pen mode.
You can think of Particle Paint pen mode as like a combination of the automatic painting features of Autodraw Interactive pen mode with the addition of multiple paint paths like MultiPen pen mode, but where the multitple paint paths are used in a different way. What is different about Particle Paint when compared to MultiPen is that instead of generating multiple paint paths that track the drawn path with some kind of spatial offset, the individual paint paths can be thought of as a swarm of N independent paint particles that move independently over time.
You can adjust specific editable parameters associated with Particle Paint pen mode in the Particle Paint Mode control panel.
I made a quick modification to the Interactive Pen paint preset we were working with previously to help make it a little bit more obvious what is going on in Particle Paint pen mode. This zip compressed 'Assisted-Draw Particle Pen 1' paint preset file is attached below.
Assisted-Draw ParticlePen 1.zip
Try interactively drawing with this paint preset to get a feel for the difference between Particle Paint pen mode and Autodraw Interactive pen mode. You can do this by changing the Pen Mode option in the Pen Mode control panel from Particle Paint to Autodraw Interactive (and vice versa).
You can also try adjusting some of the controls in the Particle Paint Mode control panel to see how they affect the behavior of the Particle Paint. Try changing the # Particles, or Turn off Swarming and see how they effect the appearance of the particle paint movement.
Keep in mind that everything we discussed before about the automatic path generation settings in the Path Shape and Path Angle and Path Randomization control panels still apply to Particle Paint pen mode. Those control panels effect how the automatic drawing generates paths for painting automatically.
Autodraw Interactive pen mode generates a single auto-draw path repeatably as you move the pen cursor. Particle Paint pen mode generates a swarm of N path particles that run simultaneously. So you are painting with a dynamic swarm of paint paths being generated in real time. The controls in the Particle Paint control panel effect the behavior of the paint path swarm interactions, which is additional movement behavior that happens on top of the underlying movement generated by the autodraw parameters in the Path Shape and Path Angle control panels.
I added some additional path randomization in the preset attached above to make the swarm of paint particles more obvious. If you turn that off in the Path Randomization control panel you will see the swarm of particles painting out the same auto-drawn path if you hold the mouse in a fixed position while painting.
Thanks for this tutorial, it's Super Helpful!
I am constantly trying to improve my knowledge of Studio Artist.
I get really good at one on aspect of the software, but also understand that there are so many more things I could do.
I should do more of these, so i'll try to keep cranking them out slowly.
It's useful for me as well. The pen modes are a good example of what i mean by that, because they got developed over time based on using the program and then seeing other things you could do with it. But in hindsight, you can look at them and think about perhaps more integrative ways to organize all of the various features that got added slowly over time. Or new ways they could be extended to do additional things you can't really do now.
Wow seriously this is a great tutorial thread, I studied it closely and made it through the whole thing to the end! I've been a Studio Artist user since the early 2000s but have mostly focused on MSG (way back in MSG Evolver days haha). I learned a whole lot from this post, and while I have enjoyed playing with the Paint Synthesizer before, now I know a whole lot that I didn't know about/understand previously. Thank you John!
There is a specific exotic flavored Path Shape option called Live Extension that is specifically designed to be used with the Autodraw Interactive pen mode. You can see how to access it in the screen shot of the Path Shape control panel below.
The Live Extension path shape option highjacks the normal autodraw path generation associated with the Autodraw Interactive pen mode. What it ends up doing instead is recirculating the previously drawn paint path into the autodraw interactive pen mode path generation process. It's really designed to be used in combination with some kind of path randomization to be used to full effect.
In the screen shot below i show this off using the zip compressed paint preset attached below called 'Assisted-Draw Live Extension 1'.
Assisted-Draw LiveExtension 1.zip
The first single user interactive paint path shown at the top of the canvas is using the path randomization settings shown in the screen shot and recorded in the attached paint preset. Note how the generated paths are tracking the previous drawing along the undulating curve i was manually drawing.
For the second undulating path at the bottom of the canvas, i set the Displace Amount to 0. When i did that you can see that the auto drawing when using the Live Extension path shape option directly reproduces what i previously painted earlier in my manually drawing. You should try this yourself to really get a sense of what i'm talking about.
Then try dialing in some other path randomization options in the Path Randomize control panel. One example below shows off how the live extension drawing changes when i did that.
Live Extension path shape is a speciality kind of thing, but can generate some really interesting assisted drawing effects. Again, you are only going to see what it does when working with Autodraw Interactive pen mode. it will default to normal curve path shape auto drawing if used with any other pen modes. And as previously mentioned, you really want to work with the path randomization controls to get the best artistic results with it.
Live extension can be especially effective with some vector paint parameter setups.
Thank you for this wonderful post John. I honestly never really grokked the power/difference of the Patch Memories, Path Momories, and Brush Memories, until now, and I haven't even made it through this whole post thread! I have learned a lot already