Edge brush question

[Chris Northcross]

Back again with another question. Unemployment can do wonders towards your Studio Artist education! I've spent the last couple of hours playing around with some autosketch/edge brushes and I'm not quite sure what makes the brush "cling" to the edges and not spill over into other regions. Anyone care to share their insights?

[Rondan]

After I read your post I decided to pop into
the paint synthesizer to see if I could answer your question. I looked at path application and other areas-but I haven't found the answer yet either.

I look forward to also being enlightened.

[Synthetik]

You can set the Path End parameters so that the stroke path will end if it leaves the area around an edge. Same kind of things for Path Start, so you could setup path starts so they always started in an edge area. You can use the texture range options in either control panel to do that. Path Start also has texture probability settings, so with those you are saying in general place more path starts in flat areas (inverse texture probability weight) or on edges (texture probability weight) A low texture value would mean a flat part of the source image, higher ranges mean areas with edges or detail.

There are also texture options for the probability control in the path application control panel. If you turn that on with the texture setting then the paint nib application along the path will tend to drop out when the stroke is in flat areas and come back on when near edges.

You can also use texture or inverse texture modulation for many other things in the paint synthesizer, like brush size or blend modulation. So depending on how a particular paint preset is configured there are a lot of different things that could be working to accent edge structure in a painting.

There's also a paint synthesizer macro edit menu to configure a paint preset to focus on edge structure (or not) when drawing. These automatically setup some of the path end and path start parameters i discussed above.

[Chris Northcross]

Well, you sentenced me to another day of mirthful SA explorations, hope you're happy.

Seriously, thanks a lot John. As always your help is useful and appreciated.

[Rondan]

Thanks for the info.

As part of experimenting with the same I tried backtracking the settings on soft outliner and edge paint in the wacom section. They don't seem to follow the above path start and path end rules.

I did see that they both had a texture energy setting in brush modulation - but that setting didn't seem to convert flat paint to an outliner.

Can you indicate the settings used for soft outliner and edge paint.

Would you consider a new Paint Synthesizer
panel that would deal with all accent edge structure in painting?

And/or comprehensive macros that can be applied?

[Synthetik]

Soft Outliner is using Texture Energy Brush Size Modulation. So the size of the brush gets modulated to 0 in flat areas of the image and a brush size of 0 doesn't make a mark.

I think macro edits are the way to go for things like editing via accenting edge structure. Either that or diving in to the paint synthesizer. This is a good example of why that's the case. The controls in the Brush Modulation control panel are grouped in a pretty understandable way, they all deal with modulating the size, orientation, and texture modulation of the source brush. Having one particular brush size modulation control option in a different control panel would be even less understandable i think.

Edge pressure scatter preset is using texture range restriction in the path start control panel. Since it's autodraw interactive pen mode the path start restrictions get checked and applied to each autodrawn path.

[Synthetik]

I forgot to point out that 3.5 does have the edge scan path start generator. So that's a totally different approach you can use if you are using automatic painting via the action button.

[Rondan]

I find that, edge scan with flat paint, it stops processing the sunflower image half way down the canvas?

[Synthetik]

Here's an example of a BW Sketch preset for 3.5 that uses the edge scan path start generator.

Edge Scan BW Sketch Ex1.zip

[Rondan]

I like this effect. But once again it completes the top 60% of the canvas and then stops. (I didn't change any settings on the preset.)

[Synthetik]

It does the entire sunflower image for me. I made a new canvas with the sunflower image we provide and the canvas set to that images size.

I took a look at it and it looks like there is an interaction going on between the size of the canvas and the # of max stroke points you specify that is causing the problem you are seeing. I'm assuming you used a different canvas size than the original sunflower size. It's supposed to be smart about skipping through the edge points so that you don't exceed the number of max strokes you specify in the preset. There's some inconsistent logic in how it's doing this for certain number combinations. I'm looking into fixing the problem this afternoon.

By reducing the max stroke setting you should be able to get it to do a full scan. Try something like 4000.