MSG advanced Editor question

[Tony Bouttell]

If I lock all the parameters in an MSG, and mutate it, why do the colours change?

More precisely, when I press the "click" the image in the advanced editor screen, all the images in the Evolution editor change color randomly.

I wanted to lock everything, and then start unlocking various parameters to see the effect. I don't want the colours to change. 

LOL... I've used SA for years and still feel like a newbie...

[Synthetik]

We should probably add some specific lock options to the color gradient and color palette streams associated with MSG presets.  So i can look into that for the next version.  We would put them in the tabs associated with them (Grad and Pal) if we do that.

Each MSG preset has 3 internal color gradients and color palettes that are accessible to any Processors via their associated Bus Streams.   Look in the Grad and Pal tabs to see them.

Note that they are independent from the actual Processors.  So when you lock the parameters of a given Processor, that is locking the individual editable parameters inside of the Processor, but that lock is not going to effect the color palettes (or color gradients), since they aren't directly associated with the Processor module, but live outside of it on the Bus as Streams. 

Streams can be color gradients, color palettes, or images. Processors act on Streams, either by transforming them in some way, or generating them from scratch.

 

There are a number of different hot key modifiers you can use when you click on the preview in the MSG Advanced Editor to mutate the current preset in the Evolution Editors Evolution Preview cells.

If you use the option modifier when you click the MSG Advanced Editor Preview, then only the color gradients and color palettes in the MSG preset are mutated.

If you use shift and option modifiers at the same time, then only the parameters in the processors are mutated, and the color gradients and color palettes are mutated.

If you hold the mouse cursor over a Studio Artist control like the MSG Advanced Editor preview cell, a help message associated with that control appears at the bottom left part of the status bar, which is located at the bottom of the workspace. So if we do that for that MSG Advanced Editor preview cell, we get the following.

There is also a hot key guide in the integrated help browser that you can goto for specific information on hot key modifiers used in different parts of the Studio Artist interface.

 

Keep in mind that ultimately what the coloring associated with a particular MSG preset is going to be is a function of how it is programmed. So if it is programmed to use color gradient or color palette mapping, then the modifiers i just described will give you control over just mutating the coloring without changing the overall parameter based visual effect, or vice versa.  But if the MSG preset is built using procedural image generators fed into different color channels to build up the visual effect coloring without using the color gridnets or color palettes, then the visual effect colorization is a product of that, so restricting a mutation to only mutating the color gradients and color palettes is not going to affect what is going on at all.