photo mosaic

[ASARE CHRISTIAN]

I'm making a mosaic but I want my paint nibs or brush to be masked in the shape I draw or I want to rotate the contents of the brush in real-time as I draw. I don't want the whole image to show in the shape that I draw, only the part I need (like masking portions of the brush image to reveal some and hide some). Would appreciate it if you could help me out with this.

[Synthetik]

It seems like you might be asking a few different questions here, so i will try to run through the answers to them.  If i'm mis-interpreting what you are asking about, let me know and i can try to address the real issue.

 

Let's start with single brush nib tiling.  So normal painting where a single paint nib is being laid down in the canvas at each mosaic position using normal non region fill as brush pen modes.

You said you wanted to hand draw a selection. So you could do that in Selection operation mode.

I used Source - local growth selection instead, since i wanted to select the face and hand areas of the source image i was working with.

I turned on the Onion Skin feature when i did this to use the onion skin as a visual aid for making the selection.

I then needed to setup my single nib tiler paint preset.  I used a few paint synthesize quickedit commands to help speed up that manual editing.

 

So i first initialized to a default start set of paint synthesizer parameters.  I then setup a single nib source brush tiler.  I then selected a folder of images i wanted to work with for the image brush.

In order to mask the painting, i turned on the Mask check box located in the main Operation Toolbar.

The painting is masked to the selection mask i made.

There is also a second masking going on, since i am using the Source Alpha Brush for the Brush Type.  I also made that manual edit shown below before i ran action to do the masked mosaic painting.

This source alpha brush masking is masking each image folder brush nib with the internal alpha mask in the png files being used for the image folder brush.

If i turn that off by setting the Brush Type to Source Brush, and uncheck the Mask check box in the Operation Toolbar to turn off the global selection masking, then i get the following.

The selection masking is noe not happening, and i'm also painting with the non alpha masked contents of the image folder brush images.

 

We will cover a different approach to building mosaics, using region fill as brush pen mode and path start regionization in the next post in this thread.

[ASARE CHRISTIAN]

John thanks much for this post, the post answers my question in part in that it paints the brushes automatically, i wanted to know how you can manually apply and modulate (i.e rotate ) the brush images in a mask region in real time. Like i want to set up the paintsynth in such a way that as i apply the brush image in a masked region some portions of the image will show while other areas become hidden as a result of my modulation.

[Synthetik]

If you are working directly with the Brush Source paint nibs, you can setup some kind of Orient Modulation in the Brush Modulation control panel to rotate the brush nibs as you paint.

I'm using Path Orientation in the example above, because i don't have a wacom tablet and pen on this particular computer.  If you have a tablet and pen that supports tilt modulation, then you can use the Tilt Orient option for the Orient Modulation to interactively modulate the rotation by the tilt orientation of the pen as you draw.

 

So what about region fill as brush pen mode. It is a little bit more funky.  

If you are using region fill as brush pen mode and something like the Rectangular option for the Manual Draw

then you can interactively rotate the rectangle, and when you release the mouse down, then the full brush image will draw in the rotated rectangle as shown below.

You will note that i changed my image brush to one that does not have an intergral alpha matte internal to it.  Because we don't support that currently for this particular rotation thing when using the region fill as brush regions.  I'll look into what we can do to support that for the next release. 

If you want to use the Brush Modulation orientation modulation settings, then you can use the Alpha Only - BrModOrientRotate option for the Brush Option in the Region as Brush Mode control panel.  Again, both this one and the ManualDrawRotate option work with the entire region as the alpha for the paint blit, they do not support just using a rotated version of the alpha channel mask that might be inside of the image brush.

The whole Brush Option thing in the Region as Brush Mode control panel is kind of clunky to be honest.  It would be nice if we cleaned it up and provided a more orthogonal approach to editing the various options you might be interested in.  Like a lot of things in the paint synthesizer, the feature set in there grew as people asked if they could do something new and we figured out how to shoe-horn it into the existing setup.

[Synthetik]

In the previous post in this thread i discussed masking using single paint brush nibs drawn normally.  Now we will dive into 'path start regionization' which uses the 'region fill as brush' penmode.

Region fill as brush pen mode is different than normal paint nib painting, because the brush is dynamic based on a region that is defined by the current paint path.  Here's a tip on pen modes if you are confused by all of this.

The first thing i'm going to do is use a quickedit command to convert my previous built single paint nib tiler to a region fill as brush photo mosaic preset as shown below.

If i run this, i get the following.

Note that the individual mosaic tiles are now different sizes.  The masked birds in the individual image folder brush images also now seem to be gone.  This is because the default settings for the quickedit i ran above are using the complete shape of the individual regions as the painting mask for the region. But i really want to use the internal alpha masks in the individual brush images instead of the entire region shape as the brush mask.  To do this, i need to go to the Region Fill as Brush control panel, and make the edit shown below.

I changed the Brush Option from Alpha Only to mask Alpha Only.

Since i also want to mask to the global selection i made in the previous post to this thread, i turned on the Mask checkbox in the main Operation Toolbar.  Running Action, i now get the following masked mosaic image shown below.

Note that i am masking both the individual mosaic tiles using the alpha masks in the individual images used for the mosaic tiles, and i am also doing a global selection mask based on the contents of the current selection buffer.

Note the Region Mask Opt parameter in the path Shape control panel is set to Use Global.  This means that the global selection can be used for masking like i show off above.

 

Prior to V5.5 only the 'Each Region as Mask' option was available.  What this means is that the global selection buffer is set to the current individual region mask shape for each region being painted.  This allows one to use the various selection modulation or inhibitor options in the paint synthesizer while auto paintin gin the individual mosaic cells associated with each region.  In V5.5 we added the second Use Global option so that people could mask out the entire mosaic painting based on the current selection buffer.  Prior to V5.5 you would have to do that in a second step (make the entire unmasked mosaic, then mask out what you wanted masked out, to a solid color fill for example).

 

[Synthetik]

Something you might not be aware of is that you can take any area of the canvas, select it, and then turn that selected area into a new image brush.  Once you do that, then you can use any of the normal brush modulation controls to work with that new image brush for normal nib painting.

Here i'm using the lasso selection option to select something in the interior of my previous rectangular image brush.

I then run the menu command below to turn that selected are into an image brush.

I'm now using that new image brush with the path orientation modulation settings in Brush Modulation control panel we talked about in a previous post in this thread.

Again, using tilt orientation modulation with a tilt sensitive pen and tablet is an option at this point.

 

As a reminder, you can also take any selected are, hold down the m (move) key while in selection operation mode, and you can do a translate selection of the contents of that selection.

[ASARE CHRISTIAN]

thank you John, this is awesome