Menu command question

[Chris Northcross]

I'm playing around with mosaic projects and happened upon a set of menu commands that I hadn't noticed before and don't quite know what they do:

file->paint synthesizer->New Move Mosaic (and New Image Folder Mosaic)

[Synthetik]

They let you select a movie file or folder of images, and then builds a default photo mosaic paint preset using the movie file or image folder you selected.  It works by running 2 paint synth macro edits, one to make the current paint synth editor settings a movie or image folder brush, and the other to make the current paint synth editor settings a default path start regionize paint.

So, it's a quick way to get a default photo mosaic paint you can then manually edit if you want variations on this kind of theme.  And there are a lot of different variations.

So here's what i get if i run it (New Image Folder Mosaic) on my current workspace (which was configured for a time particle sketch effect).

To be honest, it initially did this below since it had time particles turned on, and time particles have a limit on how many you can use since they are very memory intensive.

Here's the control panel that turns on or off time particle behavior.

Note that it is turned on, so that's why it stops drawing early (you have run into the max # of time particles limit).

When it is turned off ( ON/Off parameter = Off ), then you get the first photo mosaic image i posted above. 

You can see that there is still something else going on that is limiting painting in non edge areas of the image.  That 'draw at edge locations only' behavior is specified by the Texture Range setting in the Path Start control panel.  You can see below that the Texture range is turned On, and the Texture Min to Texture Max range is setup to run from 20-255.

If you change the Texture Range to Off, then the painting will not be restricted like it is in that first mosaic.

If you want to start with fresh default paint synth settings before you run this menu command, you can shift click the Init button at the bottom of the paint synth Editor.  Otherwise, you will be macro editing whatever your current paint synth settings were before you ran the menu command.

[Synthetik]

If you are ever in a situation where you want to get a good overview of the current paint synthesizer settings to try and understand what settings are causing it's current behavior (like in the example i go through in my first post), you can use the Get Info dialog to help out.

If you run that menu command, then you will get an overview of important settings in the current paint synth editor.  Below is what i got when i ran it to help out in that first post example.

Note that it points out both settings i needed to turn off to get the full mosaic painting in the canvas.