I was just curious to get some current feedback on people's thoughts on the Studio Artist Daily Effects Blog.
It's been going for several months at this point, so any suggestions on topics you would like to see covered, whether the existing material is too difficult or too easy, etc would be useful to help improve the site.
I've been covering MSG in particular a lot lately, so i'm also curious if people are starting to 'get' how to work with and program MSG from the posts, or not. I'm trying to lead people into getting a feel for how you can actually manually build MSG presets from scratch as well as just bang away generating new ones via directed evolution. The first approach requires some technical finesse, the second approach requires none, as long as you can press the mouse and make decisions you can get somewhere interesting. Although i think there is an 'art' to evolving MSG presets in an effective way, so i've been trying to convey some of that information as well, at least from the standpoint of how i approach working with it.
If you haven't checked out the daily effects blog, you really should. There's a tremendous amount of Studio Artist material covered there, all of it very project oriented.
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Hi John
That is one of my regular 'go to' pages. I'd like to express my appreciation for the fantastic work you do putting those up. I am particularly interested in the minutiae of studio artist, take Path start for example, the generator has a gazillion options and it is just one of the editable parameters - explorations of these I suppose are better suited to your 'tips' page [more thanks for that]. As far as effects go I'd prefer to see a lot less 'procedural' stuff and more emphasis on effects and processes that are wider ranging - for example your post a while back on lomography was pretty interesting. I hadn't thought of going there with SA. Haven't seen to much written about 'live' brushes and so haven't really pushed that yet. There is other stuff, but it seems like an incredible cheek to actually ask you to go down a path. If you're serious I'll get to writing a list. Keep doing what you're doing and thanks for it.
B_man
Please feel free to be as specific as you want to with topic requests. There's so much ground that can be covered it's easy for me to miss some topics other people might feel are really essential. Also, having lived with Studio Artist for so long it's easy for me to ignore some topic or feature that may have been around forever which i assume everyone knows about, when in fact it's a 'new' feature to many people not familiar with it.
Today's post for example is there because of a specific question Dennis asked me the other week about his particle paint preset, ie. why does it look different when i use the pen vs pressing the Action button. Hopefully i made that clear. But feel free to ask additional questions on any post if i'm not getting the point across, or you want more explanation or examples.
We could certainly get more into some more ideas for lomography effects. Especially since it's such a hot topic of the moment in the cell phone world. And i've been thinking i should probably focus some more on the paint synthesizer for awhile, so i can start delving into the mechanics of some different live paint effects.
Read it regularly John. Thank you for putting it up. I do usually try to follow or modify whatever effect you post just to see what I can do with the idea.
I often find the MSG posts with the images of the settings a bit hard to follow. Perhaps because there is just so much to program. I suppose you have your reasons for not attaching the actual MSGs, but it would be easier to follow if they were there.
Putting up more of the specific presets is a good point. I was avoiding it for awhile with the MSG examples to try and force people to actually use the Advanced Editor to try and build them from scratch.
The other issue is that i can't post the preset files directly to posterous with the blog entry, and i typically setup the posts several days before they go live, so putting them on the user forum preset sharing group before hand has the potential to get confusing, or i just get lazy about finding them and posting them later. i should probably just start posting them to the preset sharing group as dated entries in a single effect blog topic there when i setup the original post.
I'm a regular reader too, and try to follow the set ups on those that interest me, though some are a bit hard to follow, so would agree with liveart on that score. A few passes over the target is often necessary before I 'get' it.
Manually building an MSG from scratch is challenging. The hardest part is learning and understanding what the various settings do and how they effect the outcome. Understanding the effects of the parameters and changing them is the hardest and that is what I concentrate on trying to get the most out of.
Adding a new Src from the Library and seeing how it affects the immediate preset is straightforward, but then understanding how the various parameters in the PChain and Bus list work is where it gets muddy and my eyes glaze over.
A little more help would be nice, but I also realize the value and necessity of the challenge...Not being a techie doubles the challenge for me.
In following the posts on building MSG presets using directed evolution with the 3C Abstract 11 CP processor, I was unable to locate a 3 Abstract 11 CP processor in the Src library, so substituted another. The processors only go up to 3C Abstract 10 CP in my SA version: 4.03. Is there a later version of SA available that has updated processors?
Woops! My bad, i used my personal development version to pull together that particular tutorial. Which has all kinds of magical features in it we're pulling together for the future. Sorry about that.
I'm really at the point where i'm only integrating bug fixes or performance fixes into 4.04, so i don't know if that particular processor is going to make it into an actual release pre version 5 not to be honest. I've added over 100 new MSG processors from the original version 4.0 release to the 4.03 update, so at some point you have to say enough is enough and start accumulating new features for the future.
But writing a 4.03 tutorial using a processor not in 4.03 is pretty bad, so i seriously apologize for that. maybe i'll feel guilty enough to slip it into 4.04, but like i said, i have been ridiculously generous about adding new features to incremental version 4 releases.
Today in duplicating the steps for Procedural Copper Gate Posterous tutorial, I ran into a few issues where certain parameters were not available under the IO Bus Stream in the PChain.
Tmp Img doesn't exist, only Float Img does
Color Palette2 is not available either, only Color Palette
Would the reason be the same as the issue with the 3Abstract11CP processor above?
Enjoyed going through the process, but my final result was obviously quite different, but interesting.
You can edit the Bus List in the same way you can edit the Processor List. You drag items over from the Source library on the right side of the MSG Advanced Editor into the Bus list.
When the Bus is active on the left side, the source library updates to display possible stream types that can be dragged and dropped onto the Bus list. The source library changes to a list of processors when the Processor list is active on the left side.
So you would need to drag and drop the Tmp Img stream from the source library over to the Bus list. At that point, if you switched back to the processor list, selected a specific processor, and then brought up the IO editor for it on the right side, you would see Tmp Img as a stream option in the popups you can attach to individual Ports for that processor.
The Bus always includes ROut, GOut, BOut, which are the 3 output image streams for a MSG effect. But anything else on the Bus is optional. You design it based on what kinds of streams you want to have access to for building the effect.
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