MSG editing

[Saša S]

Hello John,

Is there some beginner guide on how to construct MSG presets?

What I'm trying to do is very simple, but available presets seem too complicated.

I would like to use simple geometric forms (circles: concentric rings, segments; squares, stars, etc) in MSG movie brush for building mosaic.

 

Here are few examples of what I would like to be able to do

http://flic.kr/p/7SU5fX

http://flic.kr/p/7Sfn5T

 

Thanks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Synthetik]

It might be easier to just use the paint synthesizer to do some things like concentric circle or square colored images to build frames for a movie brush.

 

Here's a really simple colored gradient sphere MSG preset attached below.

 

I'll try and put together a tutorial or daily effects on building simple geometric shapes with MSG.

 

There are lots of tips on the Studio Artist tips site that discuss the mechanics of MSG editing.

Sphere1.msg.zip

[Saša S]

Could you please post some presets for this:

use the paint synthesizer to do some things like concentric circle or square colored images to build frames for a movie brush.

thanks!

[Synthetik]

Here's a tiling paint preset to play with to give you some ideas. It paints a 128 tile constrained circle. I used the mouse and 2 different hand selected fixed colors (source area color picker) to paint in the circles into a 256x256 canvas.

You can play around with different source brushes, source brush sizes and tiling parameter settings. This next one was with a Source Brush Type as opposed to the anti-aliased brush type used in the posted preset.

Getting the right side and bottom side tile fills might require changing the Tile Offset parameters in the Path Application control panel since the mouse coordinates round based on those settings. So i boosted the H Tile Offset to 100% to paint in the right most brown square, and the V Tile Offset to 100% to paint in the bottom most brown square.

 

Again, i'm doing hand painting with these (as opposed to pressing the Action button).

circleTile-128.paint.zip

[Saša S]

Thanks for the preset

could you please explain what you mean by 

This next one was with a Source Brush Type as opposed to the anti-aliased brush type used in the posted preset.

How do I generate concentric circles with this preset?  I understood your suggestion is multiple passes of scaled down circles, please correct me if I'm wrong. I hope there's more elegant solution for this

 

PS. the second picture from your last reply, how did you do that?

 

Thanks 

[Synthetik]

You select the paint synthesizer's Brush Type in the Brush Type control panel.

 

The AntiAliased Solid brush type overrides the normal raster Brush Source image and paints an anti-aliased vector brush or vector paint stroke. The posted preset is using a Sphere for the Vector Type parameter associated with the AntiAliased Solid brush type.

 

The Source Brush option for the Brush Type uses the settings and associated brush image in the Brush Source.

 

You can adjust the Brush Size in either the brush Source control panel, or you can reduce the Max Size Range in the Brush Modulation control panel. So by reducing the brush size you can paint a second smaller circle on top of an initial larger one.

 

The anti-aliased solid brush type also has an additional Size Scale control in the Brush type control panel you can use to reduce the size of the vector brush it you are using that brush type option. It's useful because you can build DualFill paint presets that draw with vector and raster paint at the same time. So you an reduce the size of the vector painting component and then have a larger size raster brush source that smears or melts the vector paint.

[Saša S]

Many thanks John! Here's what I managed with your help.

Now, how do I generate .eps from the PASeq I recorderd?

[Synthetik]

Here's some tips on generating eps files.

 

Here's a tip on generating SVG output.

[Synthetik]

Here's the second paint preset i used that is using a source brush type.

 

you need to manually adjust the Brush Source size. So i started with 128x128 for the initial yellow center rect. i then changed it to 64x64 for the brown rects.

 

as i mentioned above, you also need to change the H and V Tile Offset to 100% to paint in the right side and the bottom side rects. 

squareTile-64.paint.zip

[Synthetik]

I posted a few quick examples of simple MSG presets that build simple geometric shapes here.

 

I'll add a new processor for the future that is specifically oriented at generated centered simple geometric shapes. There's a few Sphere processors designed to generated source brush images for the paint synthesizer, but they also have a lot of randomization features built into them. You can use the lock option for editable parameters to keep something like a randomization parameter turned off when you evolve new presets in the Evolution editor.

 

There's a number of different gradient generating processors, so some of these presets use those along with a Quantize processor to limit the range of gray values. All of these presets build a single channel image that is then index mapped through a color gradient to generate color output.