Hi,
I'm failing to get Mosaic working in any form. Trying to follow the videos such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcFcPbfzicQ.
With SA 5.5 I have
1) Picked Paint Synthesizer Classic.
2) Then I have picked File, Paint Synthesizer, New Image File Brush.
3) I selected a folder full of .png files that work as source images in SA.
4) I then select one of the Mozaic drop downs (such as abstract) and then a preset.
When I run it it only applies the preset. There is no tiling at all.
What did I miss?
Thank you,
Gary
Replies
After reboting I see tiling. After adding JPEG pictures I now see them being added. So apparently png files, which are fine for the base image, are ignored.
It would seem JPEG files work. What other file types are acceptable?
Idea - maybe add some type of screen hint or something - upi UI just shows the empty folder (for brush folders) regardless of what is in it....
And now its not tiling again. I have no idea why.
What would cause no tiling with the above settings? I've tried a few of the Mosiac options from the drop down, same for all.
I want to point out that our tech support tickets are a good resource for this kind of question. Especially if you are working with one of the video tutorials and you seem to be getting different results than what you see in the video. There is a tech support ticket option located under the support menu that you can use to start one. The folks who made those tutorial videos are going to be the ones answering your question.
If you do start a support ticket for this kind of question(s) keep in mind that Studio Artist ships with well over 10,000 different presets, so it really helps to be very specific about which one you are working with, and what you specifically did or didn't do with it, because again there are a lot of different options one could take to using any given preset. You also want to mention what computer os version and Studio Artist version you are running.
...
So mosaic effects. There are a lot of different approaches one could use to build them in Studio Artist. There are mosaics that can be built with solid or patterning colorings. There are photo mosaic effects (mosaics made to represent an image that are composed of a lot of smaller sub-image tiles) One could build video mosaic effects (where the sub-tiles are movies). Or the tiles could be composed of alpha matted objects or images.
Tilings could be totally regular, or they could be random (piled on top of each other), or they could be spatially adaptive.
I mentioned sub-nested, so this is like a regular tiling, but then each individual tile might be sub-divided into 2 or more likely 4 sub tiles (that live inside of the larger master tile they are derived from). This is a great technique to help build structured detail in a mosaic image. Studio Artist user Charis Tsevis is highly adept that this sub-nested regular grid tile kind of photo mosaic and/or colored pattern tiling approach to building mosaic artwork.
Now what is a mosaic?
I tend to think of them as regular tilings of the plane. Where the individual tiles are small squares or rectangles. But they could also be triangles, delaunay triangularization, voronoi patternings, close packed shapes like circles or ellipses, sub-nested tilings, etc. And tiling grids could be regular tilings, or they could be adaptive tilings, or they could be irregular tilings. they might be close packed, or have space between them (think about bathroom tile pieces and the grout between them).
So there are multiple different approaches to building them.
If you goto the knowledgebase blog at the main synthetik website, and click on the mosaics tab at the top to filter the blog posts to ones that just mention mosaic in them, quite a few will come up there to check out. So if you are looking for an approach to a particular kind of mosaic patterning or generation technique, you can hunt through those posts for one that is focused on your questions. Or you can ask us to make a new one if your specific questions is not covered there.
Now how could one make a mosaic effect in Studio Artist?
There are many different approaches. One could use the paint synthesizer of course, but one could also use the Vectorizer, various IpOp effects, or certain MSG effects.
Studio Artist also contains Paint Action Sequence (PASeq) presets, which one could think of a scripts of multiple action steps (each action step is one specific automatic or manual Studio Artist effect actions). Now there are factory PASeq presets that showcase different kinds of mosaic effects. But you need to keep in mind that they are composed of individual action steps using other operation modes in Studio Artist. So if you want to understand what they are doing then you need to look at each individual action step, understand what it is doing, and then understand how the different action steps used in the PASeq work together to build the cumulative overall effect. And if you want to edit them (maybe to use your own uniqiue image assets internally), you could have to edit the individual associated action steps, and then make sure those editing changes were actually recorded back into the PASeq they were derived off of.
Now if you are using the paint synthesizer to construct mosaic effects, there are 2 main approaches. Tiling with individual paint nibs, and working with 'path start regionization'.
Paint Nibs
Individual paint nibs are pretty straight foreward. They are directly derived off of your current Brush Source. So if the Brush Source is a computational brush, then you get a procedurally generated blob that could look like a sphere or a wavy circle, or a cloud of noise, or a solid square or rectangle, it all depends on how you setup the controls in the Brush Source control panel.
If your Brush Source is an image brush, then your paint nib is going to the the particular image you specified as the image file asset for that image brush.
Same kind of thing for an image folder brush, expect your brush attributes are now a collection of different image files that all live inside of the image folder you specified as the folder asset for the image folder brush.
A movie brush is like an image brush, except that the file asset is a movie file.
Both image folder brushes and movie brushes can use brush frame indexing to index into different frames (frames of the movie, or alphabetical named image files in the case of an image folder brush). One could frame index sequentially, randomly, track the current framer time of a progressing animation, track the movement along a paint path, etc. RGB mapping is a particular kind of frame indexing that tries to choose the movie frame or image file that best represents some spatial associated area of the source image you are trying to paint in.
So RGB mapping is often used for building photo mosaic effects. But it doesn't have to be, one could use sequential or random frame indexing, and then use the Brush Load control panel in the paint synthesizer to auto-colorize the incoming frames or image files used in the Brush Source to color match some spatial area of the source image.
There are other more esoteric kind of Brush Source, like MSG live brushes. These run the current MSG preset to generate brush nibs on the fly as you are drawing. There are over 640 different MSG processor modules that can be hooked up into customizable generative and/or source processing image effects, so the range of potential things one could do with them is astronomical (and includes mosaic and photo mosaic effects).
So what do we do with our paint nibs defined by the settings in the Brush Source control panel?
At it's most basic level, the paint synthesizer works by defining a set of path start points (Path Start control panel), then defining a path to be drawn or painted (Path Shape, Path Angle control panels). So if you want a regular tiling pattern for laying down your paint nibs, you could choose one of those Generator options in Path Start.
If you just want to lay down single paint nibs (not extended paint paths), then you would want your Max Path length in Path Shape control panel to be 1 (so only one individual paint nib is painted for each path start position).
Path Start Regionization
There are a large number of different Generator options in the Path Start control panel that perform path start regionization. Most of them have 'Regonize' in their name.
The way they work is that they intelligently analyze the current source image by some kind of visual criteria, and then break it up into a series of intelligently designed sub regions. Each of those sub regions is then made available for the paint synthesizer after this initial analysis.
They can be painted in with solid colors, with any Brush Source (so computational, image, image folder, movie, MSG, etc).
Or they might be used to build hatching pattens that are then painted in using the conventional 'drop paint nibs on a path' paint synthesizer drawing model.
Treating each individual region as a solid shape to be filled in with color or patterned color or an image or movie frame is done with the 'Region Fill as Brush' pen mode options. Region Fill as Brush is a special pen mode that works differently from what we called the normal paint nib dropped along a path model of painting.
Region Fill as Brush treats the entire paint path as a boundary to define a one time unique brush shape. So it essentially overrides the current Brush Source settings, defining a unique brush shape based on the shape of the associated current path that can then be painted in.
Most of the factory mosaic and photo mosaic presets are using path start regionization under the hood. not all, but a lot of them.
Depending on how the paint synthesizer is configured, the entire Brush Source (RGB channels and alpha channel) can be overridden, or just the brush alpha channel can be overwritten. That last alpha only option is very useful for things like photo mosaic effects, because then the image or movie frame in the brush will be resized to fit the current temporary region (and associated alpha mask) defined by the current paint path.
Some of the factory paint presets may be using this. Others may be using another option that allows any internal alpha channel associated with those individual brush images or movie frames to pass through into the interior of the current region fill as brush shape defined by the current path.
Now i am pointing all of this out because whether a given paint preset seems to be working or not working when you try to point it at other image or movie file assets is going to depend on how that particular paint preset is setup.
Is it using internal alpha channels in the brush image file assets, or not? Is it using Brush Load to auto-colorize? Is it just painting solid color with computational brushes, not image or image folder brushes, is it doing regular nib tiling on a grid, or path start regionization, etc. Are the path start or path end inhibitor settings turned on that are restricting drawing in some way?
And as i stated earlier above, if you are dealing with a PASeq preset, then it isn't enough just to adjust control panel settings, you would also have to record them back into the PASeq into the appropriate actions tep if you want then to playback in a custom edited version of the PASeq preset.
The knowledgebase articles i mentioned above cover all of what i just described in quite a bit of detail. And even if the individual posts are not super recent, everything they cover feature-wise is still available in the program.
I'm happy to run through some of this stuff in more detail with screen snaps if people are interested.
If you want to understand more about how a specific preset works internally, how one might edit it, i'm happy to answer that kind of question as well.
We included some QuickEdit commands in V5.5.5 to help you build these kinds of paint presets more easily, because some of the internal details for some of the various mosaic effect permutations discussed above can be involved to initially setup. The QuickEdit commands do it with a single menu command.
I'll post some more specific info on some specific examples with some screen shot showing what i am adjusting later today.
So we can run through a simple paint nib tiling, and a simple path start regionization effect.
OK - wow. I'm blown away. Thats a ton of great info (thank you!). Hopefully someday more of that will make sense to me. Right now its mostly over my head.
I'm going to have a look at the https://synthetik.com/blog/ Mosaic vidoes that you suggested. I'm such a beginnger that I really just need a basic list of steps to produce various basic Mosaic patterns.
Hopefully I will get it working after watching the blog videos. Point noted about making a support ticket. If you do happen to come up with a simple video or list of basic steps I could try, great.
Thank you,
Gary
Are you focused on photo mosaic effects, or just the general issue of how to do different tiling patterns with some paint nib?
For now I would like to focus on Mosaic effects. I'll want to learn more (than Mosaics) and it seems like there is a lot of cross play between functions in SA. So much to learn. But for now, just Mosaics. Thanks, Gary
Someone from tech support will give you a detailed answer to your question later today, but i get cc'd on those as they come in, and i did notice one thing that might be messing you up.
You said that you choose a paint preset from the Mosaic - Image Folder - Try Your Own Images, and then you used File : Paint Synthesizer : New Image Brush menu command. So that will load a single image file as an image brush.
Which is fine if you only want a single image to be used for the tiling, but if you want multiple images in a folder to be used, then you need to choose the New Image Folder Brush menu under File : Paint Synthesizer. This brings up a dialog you can use to choose a folder of images.
Some of the paint presets in that 'Mosaic - Image Folder - Try Your Own Images' are designed to work off of png images that have an internal alpha mask in them.
So if you used a png image with no alpha or it is set to full off, then they might not seem to be doing anything. Most of the png images we include in the Brush folder inside of your Studio Artist folder that are used with the factory presets have internal alpha masks associated with them. I think the naming of those presets distinguishes whether they are working with image brush alpha channels or not.
Jpeg images don't support alpha channels, so the paint synthesizer would revert to assuming it is full on if you were using one of those. So the difference between png and jpg images you ran into (if i'm understanding what you were saying correctly) could be because of that distinction. Anyway, Asher or Sean will give you a detailed explanation later today when they answer your tech support ticket.
I'll post an explanation on how to build mosaic presets from scratch later today here. If you use the new QuickEdit commands it is not all that hard to do from scratch.
P.S. Those blog videos appear to be snippets of the key parts of particular processes - I still have not figured out why I can't get basic tiles to consistently appear. I'll struggle some more and then cut a ticket if I can't get going. Thanks again.
Gary
OK, let's run through how to create a simple nib tiler from scratch. We're going to do this in the paint synthesizer, so go there in the Editor if you aren't already in paint synthesizer classic operation mode with the Eidtor open in the workspace.
When creating a new preset from scratch, it is best practice to start from a know start point.
You can do this by running the Initialize QuickEdit command.
Or, you can achieve the same thing by shift clicking the Init button located at the bottom of the paint synthesizer Editor panel.
Clicking Init button initializes the current control panel, shift clicking it initializes all of the control panels for the current op mode.
We want to make a single paint nib tiler. Normally that would involve setting up the path start generator for a tiling pattern, setting up the Max Path length to be 1 so we get a single paint nib for each paint path, and setting up other control panels like Paint Fill Setup to display the Brush Source nib (or to colorize it in some way if we want that instead).
The super easy way is to run the QuickEdit command shown below that makes a single nib tiler.
And we are done.
So now if we press action, we get a tiled painting of our beautiful initialized source brush as the paint nib, as shown below.
Quick, slap a NFT sticker on it (ha,ha). Your fortune awaits...
Using something more interesting as our source brush might be more fun. So, let's use the fabulous Mr Bear brush image from the dawn of Studio Artist time that still lives inside of the Brush folder.
So now if i press action, i get the following.
And we now have a simple single nib tiling pattern where the paint nib is the single image filer we loaded as our image source brush.
So suppose you want to use a folder of images instead.
You can do that by using the alternate File : Paint Synthesizer menu command that loads an image folder as an image folder brush.
I selected the Action Figures folder inside of the Brush/Mosaic Image Folders folder.
So now if i press action i get the following.
Now the individual images in that folder are much larger than that old Mr Bear image i used as the image file source brush.
If i goto the Brush Modulation control panel and cut the max size down to 20%, i get the following.
So now you can see the tiling pattern better, because the source brush is sized in a reasonable way for the canvas size i am working with.
You should also note that if you have different sized images inside of your image folder, then they are not going to be well behaved when used with this particular single paint nib tiling approach to building a mosaic painting.. They will work with any 'path start regionization' approach, because the individual images are resized on the fly to match the tile size being painted with that approach. But when doing conventional single paint nib tiling, the only resizing going on is whatever you have specified in the Brush Modulation control panel, and those just adjust as a percent of the default 100% original size, not arbitrarily rescale to whatever region fill as brush size you are filling, which is what is happening when you are using path start regionization.
It all has to do with the Pen Mode you are working with. This single paint nib approach is using any of the conventional Pen Mode options, so just Interactive Pen in this particular case. The 'path start regionization' approaches all use the Region fill as Brush pen mode, which is the one that generates a temporary source brush on the fly that matches the shape of the region being painted.
Here's a tip on Pen Modes if you are confused by this.
Now if you are confused by the coloring or lack of it in the pattern above, take a gander at the Paint Fill Setup control panel. And at the action figure images, which are not very colorful. If you change the Fill Option in paint Fill Setup from Blend to From, then the blend going on will be turned off, and you will get the straight images from the folder blitted down on to the canvas.
Now, if you want some colorization, you can use the Paint Brush Load control panel to do it. Or you could use one of the Fill From Mod options that brings in some color, there are always multiple ways to do something in general in Studio Artist. Or you could use a better folder of images with some color variations in them that represent the coloring in your source image, and make sure the Frame Modulation in Brush Source is RGB Mapping.
Ok, let us endeavor to make a 'path start regionization' tiler from scratch.
If you have been following my previous post, you now know how to build a single paint nib tiler from scratch. And we loaded the Action Figures folder of images we ship in our Brush folder as the image folder brush.
Normally, configuring the paint synthesizer to set it up for 'path start regionization' is a little bit tedious. You need to make sure parameters located on multiple control panels are setup correctly.
But since we are lazy, we will just use a QuickEdit command to do it, as shown below.
And we are done, since we already had that Action Figures image folder brush setup. So hitting action, we get the following.
So we now have an adaptive tiling pattern, made using the 'path start regionization' approach. If you look at the Path Start control panel, you will see that the Rect Tile HV Split Regionize algorithm is being used. You can mess with the parameters in that control panel to change the adaptive tiling pattern.
Now adding some color to this pretty boring tiling image would be useful.
And we have another QuickEdit command to the rescue to make our life easy.
After running this QuickEdit command, if you hit action you get the following.
So now we are auto-coloring our image folder brush paint nibs on the fly. Check out the Paint Fill Setup control panel, and note where the output of Brush Load is hooked in now in paint Fill Setup (due to that QuickEdit colorize command we ran).
You can of course run the File : Paint Synthesizer : New Image Folder Brush menu command to point it at different folder of images to use as your image folder brush.
As i pointed out before, since we are using the 'path start regionization' approach, your images in the folder can be of different sizes and this is still going to work (not true for the single paint nib tiler example).
You can also go back to the Path Start control panel and try other Regionize named options foer the Generator, and see what you can come up with.
Or, if you are lazy, you can just use the following QuickEdit to try your luck with a randomly generated preset.
So there's the menu command, and the randomly generated image folder mosaic preset it generated. This menu comamand randomly selects an image folder from your current brush folder cache location in addition to randomly making a new image folder brush preset. How good it looks may vary, try again if you don't like what it does. You can use the Action :Gallery Show : Assets menu to retarget the image brush folder cache location if you so desire.
Now when i said this is all pretty easy, you probably didn't believe me. But with the new QuickEdit commands it really is.
I would encourage you to run through the different control panels in the paint synthesizer to see what the QuickEdit commands we ran actually do.
It is good to learn how to do it the old fashioned way by hand, or at least know where to look for certain things if you want to change them. But i know how all that stuff works, and i still use the QuickEdits to do it most of the time, they are just way quicker, and you are less likely to make a mistake.
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