Brick Wall Movie Brush Example

[Synthetik]

Here's a set of presets that run through some different approaches to rendering source images as brick wall mosaics. After unzipping the download file you will have a folder called brickBrush. Place this movie file in the Brush folder in your main Studio Artist folder. There are several paint presets that show off some different approaches to building movie source brush mosaic effects with region as brush pen mode. There is also a paseq preset that shows off how to use the vectorizer to generate region shapes that are then filled in by the paint synthesizer using the movie source brush. These presets were posted in response to this discussion. A Studio Artist news blog article will discuss the presets in more detail.

brickMovieBrushEx.zip

[Synthetik]

Here's the new Studio Artist News blog entry that discusses these presets in more depth.

[Dev Dodd]

Thanks John!
The post and discussion on this process is invaluable. And you've given us some neat stuff here to play with and to de- and reconstruct.
One question though. You outlined the way to colorize the movie frames relative to the source colors, but in choosing your images to go into the movie [brush] do you usually try to get an assortment of images that range light to dark, or does it seem to matter much? Some of the edge definition of your subject that you've gotten recently really [to my eye] is keeping the subject accessible without drowning it in the technique, and this to my way of thinking is a good thing. My own attempts at movie brush/mosaic paintings have been unsatisfying because of that problem and I think you've shed some very helpful light on how to get beyond that [problem]. Tanks again.

[Synthetik]

Well, the new DM options for adaptive block and watershed path start regionization do help quite a bit to get great edge rendition in photo mosaic images, and i am taking advantage of that in the images i've been doing recently, so that is a new feature in version 4 to lust after.

You could do something like an adaptive block regionize and then pile on top some additional regions using normal path start sampling and the 'grow region from start point' path shape and the region as brush pen mode. Or a second path start regionize pass with Paint Fill Apply Nib Masking set to local image range to get more edge definition.

Another thing i've been doing recently is adding a vectorized black outline with 40-60% transparency. You can use the outline vectorizer technique, or you can generate an edge outline with some other technique and then vectorize that.

And as i mentioned in the recent paint strategy news blog post, i have various finishing techniques i always use to fine tune images before saving.

[Rondan]

Thanks for the presets and info.
I am in the process of exploring them.

[liveart]

I take it then you are saving the images as vector work as well? or are you talking exclusively about movie images?

[Synthetik]

I'm not sure i understand this question? The photomosaic is made from images stored in individual frames in the quicktime movie used for the movie source brush. The vectorizer outline i mentioned is min composited into the photo mosaic to add some subtle outlining of the source image the mosaic is trying to represent. So there's no eps output involved, it's all done to generate a raster image.

[liveart]

I suppose that I am/was confused why you'd need to vectorize and edge outline if you were only working with a raster image. I can see why one might use the vectorizer to create the outline. But why do a secondary vector op on a edge outline generated by another technique?

[Synthetik]

Because you can stylize the edge outline with the vectorizer region effects.

[Gad Eko Hendro H]

Didn't work for version 4 ? 

I import brushmov, then not appear and so PASeq and preset

[Synthetik]

Just worked for me fine using SA 4.06 on a mac. When you download brickMovieBrushEx.zip file, after decompressing the zip file you get a brickMoviebrushEx folder, containing the movie, a paseq, and several paint presets. the paint presets and the paseq preset all work for me, i just ran them.

The mac's idiot gatekeeper security barks a stupid warning message when you try to open them on recent versions of osx, but you can manually override that by going to the Security panel in the main mac System Preferences and hitting the button that says open them anyway.

Are you on windows by any chance? Maybe an issue with the mac zip compression not decompressing properly on your windows system. We have seen that before.