How to generate movie showing a progressive transformation of an MSG ( manually or automatically created )
A: I would like to be able ( using pen or mouse ) to move ( morph ) manually the shape of a MSG and record all translation( movement ) that i could manually generate.
B: I would also like to record ( movie ) of the automated process of transformation of an MSG using the evolution window ( see image include )
In fact I would like to create movie seeing those forms moving producing all the colors that their transparencies allow .
Here is a window showing a MSG and the corresponding Evolution EditorEvolution Editor window.jpg
paul rioux
Replies
We'll start with your question A.
The first approach we'll look at is using keyframe interpolation. We will record different snapshots of MSG parameter edits, turn those into keyframes in a MSG action in a Paint Action Sequence (PASeq). At that point you can just render out the PASeq using one of the Action : Animate menu commands.
I'm going to start with a very simple MSG preset.
I also have the MSG Animation memories active in the MSG Advanced Editor. If you are missing those in your displayed interface you can turn them on in the MSG preference tab in the main preference dialog.
I option clicked the first MSG memory to record the start MSG parameter configuration.
Now i'm going to make an editing change. You said you were using the t hotkey in the MSG preciew cell to perform an interactive translation of the preview image. You can go ahead and do that. Once you get it to where you want it to be for the next keyframe, go ahead and option click the second keyframe cell to record the new keyframe in the MSG memories.
Note that the interactive t hotkey translation edit i made in the MSG preview cell has not propagated to the canvas in the screen shot below. You would have to press the action button to run the modified MSG effect (or drag the MSG preview to the canvas to do the same thing).
You can also manually adjust the individual parmameters in the MSG Advanced Editor to do the same thing (the translation effect show above). The advantage of the hot key interactive adjustment is that it can potentially adjust multiple individual parameters at the same time in different MSG processors that are being used to build the MSG effect.
Once you have all of your MSG keyframes recorded in the MSG memory cells, you can control click in the MSG Advanced Editor to bring up the contextual menu commands associated with the MSG Advanced Editor.
The 'Generate PASeq Animation from Memories ...' menu command will convert what you have recorded in the MSG memory cells into a single keyframed MSG action step in the Paint Action Sequence (PASeq) palette.
When you run the 'Generate PASeq Animation from Memories ...' menu command you get a dialog that lets you specify the number of frames between each of the keyframes. I used the default 10 frame option, but you could change it to anything you want.
At this point you can press Animate in the PASeq palette to preview the recorded keyframe animation in the main canvas.
You can render out the keyframed MSG animation using any of the Action : Animate menu commands.
The one shown above will output to a movie file. The frame rate and codec of the rendered movie file is specified in the movie tab in the main preference dialog.
So that is how you can do a keyframe animation of a MSG preset parameter edit. We'll run through an alternate approach in a subsequent post to this thread that isn't based on keyframing using loop action of the live running MSG effect. If you do it this way you can see the changes happen in the canvas live. If you have a stream active then you could stream those live changes out to the open stream.
I'll also cover your B question in a subsequent post to this thread.
In the previous post i used keyframe animation via the MSG memories to generate a MSG animation. Using the MSG memories is convenient, but you could always do the MSG keyframing directly in the PASeq timeline if you want more control over the timing of the individual keyframe cells. Using the menu command we discussed sets up all of the keyframes to be equally spaced apart.
If you do it manually you can choose any keyframe timing you want for the individual keyframes. But you then have to manually record each keyframe one by one. You option click in the PASeq timeline to record a new keyframe for a particular action.
Here's a tip on introduction to paint action sequences that discusses the PASeq palette and timeline editor in detail (along with a tutorial video).
An alternate approach to keyframing would be to use loop action and stream output.
Loop action runs a particular operation mode effect over and over again until you press the space bar to stop it.
If you did nothing while it was running, the same effect would run over and over again. But if you adjust any of the adjustable parameters for the effect while it is running in loop action, you can see the live edit take place in the running effect in the canvas.
So, you could take your MSG effect, start loop action, then do your interactive translation adjustments to the MSG preview cell in the MSG Advanced Editor, and the adjustments you are making to the associated parameters of the effect will show up as changes in the effect output being displayed in the canvas. The changes show up in the next loop output, so depending on how quickly the effect renders into the canvas there may be some lag between what you are doing interactively vs what is being displayed in the canvas.
If you have streaming turned on with the appropriate stream write flag setup, then the edits you are making while loop action is running will be reflected in the stream output.
Here's a tip on live stream video capture and image streams that contains more info and a tutorial video on how streaming works in Studio Artist.
For the approach discussed above, Enable Gated Auto-write is probably the stream write flag that makes the most sense. Enable Write on Op End would be an alternative that might make sense if the individual actions in the loop action are slow. You are going to have to experiment with this to get a sense of how it works and whether it makes sense for your particular effect setup or not.
Question B asked about using the MSG Evolution Editor to create a MSG animation.
The screen shot below shows the approach i took to do that.
I'm using keyframe animation again in the PASeq timeline. Each of the preview cells in the Evolution Editor was recorded as an individual keyframe in a single MSG action step in a PASeq.
You could of course do this manually one by one. If you s click an individual evolution editor preview cell, then it's contents are moved to the MSG Advanced Editor without generating new evolution editor previews like a normal click on an evolution cell does. When i say s click, i mean i'm using the s hotkey for the click, so hold down the s sky, then click on the preview cell while the s key is still held down.
Doing the whole thing manually gives you more control, but it can be tedious. Fortunately there is a contextual menu option in V5.5 that lets you do the whole thing automatically.
This is the way i did it above. When you run that contextual menu command, 2 dilogs will come up in succession. The first asks you how many evolution editor preview cells to process, the second one asks for the frame spacing between the generated keyframes in the MSG action in the PASeq timeline. I again used a frame spacing of 10 frames for my example above.
At this point you can use any of the Action : Animate menu commands to render it out.
One thing to be aware of is that the results from parameter keyframe adjustment over time for any particular effect are going to depend on what happens visually as you make the adjustments. Slider adjustments tend to be smooth and continuous as you adjust them. Popup adjustments tend to be abrupt changes visually.
The MSG Advanced Editor currently displays both types of adjustable parameter types as an interactive slider (unlike the main Editor palette for other operation mode parameter adjustments like in IP OPs, paint synth, etc which uses sliders and popup menu controls to distinguish the 2 types of parameters) so you need to experiment to see if the particular MSG effect and the specific adjustments you are making are going to smoothly interpolate visually or not.
So what is one to do if you are working with a particular MSG effect that does not smoothly keyframe interpolate visually?
There is an alternate approach to building a MSG animation for that kind of effect. You can use Transition Contexts to do the transformations instead of keyframing parameter adjustments. We will discuss that in another post to this thread.
I mentioned that there was an alternative approach to generating smooth animation from MSG effects that do not keyframe parameter adjustment interpolate with visual smoothness. The approach to doing this is to use a Transition Context to generate transitions between the rendered MSG effect output for each of the MSG keyframes. So rather than interpolating adjustable parameters we are using a transition effect on the rendered effect images. V5.5 has some new features that make this pretty easy to do.
I started by using the same contextual menu command as the last post in the Evolution Editor.
When i run the 'Generate PASeq Animation from Grid...' contextual menu, make sure to set the spacing for the keyframed animation to 1 frame.
Doing so will result in the PASeq timeline shown below, where the individual keyframes are spaced next to each other with no blank interpolation spacing between them.
We did this because we are going to convert the keyframed MSG effects into hard rendered Transition Context keyframes using the appropriate Action : Animate menu command shown below.
When you run the Action : Animate with Paint Action Sequence : to Transition Context menu command, 2 dialogs will come up in succession.
The first lets you setup a base name for the individual frame images that will be rendered out to your hard disk.
I'm just using a default name 'frame'. Each individual rendered frame image will start with that default name and then be sequentially numbered.
A second dialog then comes up that lets you specify the folder where you want these individual frame images to be rendered out to.
I made a new folder at an appropriate place on my hard disk, pressed Create, and then pressed the Open dialog in the standard file dialog shown above. So this is the folder where the individual frame images will bre written out to as they are rendered out.
After all of this rendering from the Action : Animate menu command takes place, i have a new generated Transition Context action step in my PASeq palette.
I muted the original MSG action step those Transition Context keyframes were generated from.
At this point i can time expand the PASe timeline using the Action menu command shown below.
This will time expand the PASeq timeline as shown below.
The next thing i need to do is to setup what kind of Transition effect i want. You do this by switching to Paint Action Sequence option mode, and then go to the main Editor palette and go to the Transition Context panel there.
I used the Flow algorithm and i'm routing the output of the transition effect to the canvas.
If you save a PASeq preset at this point, you can save the PASeq with the keyframed Transition Context, and the settings of this Transition Context panel will also be saved in the PASeq preset file.
At this point if you press Animate in the PASeq palette you can see what the transition animation looks like. You can then render it out using the normal Action : Animate with Paint Action Sequence menu commands.