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is it possible to change/control what pallets appear in the Grad Tab?
Read more…Nü Müzak
"Nü Müzak" video made with MSGs. The muzak (haha) was made with Bespoke Synth (cool free modular music program). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRSzm1-QBMI&t=305s&ab_channel=Thorrific
Read more…I am looking for an Art Deco type effect
I am looking for an Art Deco type effect, does anyone have that type of effect...?
Read more…Is anybody making a copy of all the material in the Tutorials Forum
Since the Forum is going away in June, has anyone started to make a copy of all the stuff in the Tutorials forum?I've made copies of some of the tutorial material on the main site, but haven't looked at the Tutorial Forum yet.I'm going to continue copying as much as I can for my own personal use anyway, but if anyone else is doing it, or has already started doing it, please let me know.Maybe we can co-ordinate our efforts. ps can't ..... believe John, would let this happen without so much as a…
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Now, there are lots of other paint presets that are designed to do auto painting. So yes, if you are examining them from a musical analogy point of view then they are in some sense musical instruments that also self play a musical composition. Although i think they might be more analogous to a jazz musician improvising in a particular style as opposed to an instrument playing a piece of sheet music. I say this because they adapt to different source images and try to paint them in the particular style they have been programed to generate.
It's also possible to configure the paint synthesizer to create totally procedural art pieces, and in some sense maybe that is the musical instrument playing sheet music analogy.
As far as preset organization goes, we take a stab at it but we encourage people to reorganize presets as they see fit. Studio Artist 4 provides some new features to do that. The new preset Favorites features are one approach. You can make custom favorite categories for easy access. And you can mix and match different preset types in a single favorites category. So if you use certain paint presets and image operation presets to build a particular art style you can include them both in one favorites category for easy access when working.
You've always been able to reorganize the factory preset organization. You can make your own custom collections and categories. You can move the presets around or you can make copies of the preset files if you want to keep the original organization intact.
Version 4 also allows you to build custom html help pages that document presets. These help pages can be viewed in the v4 help browser. They can also include command links that will load the particular preset they discuss when the link is pressed. The CD_hand_drawn_media preset collection is fully documented in this way, and is accessible via the custom button in the help browser toolbar.
Deeper level than a preset? I've discussed the concept of building an artist strategy before. There's a section in the User Guide that delves into this. By artistic strategy i mean the sequence of steps required to build a rendered piece of art or artistic image in a particular artistic style. In general you would need to work with more than one paint preset to do this. It's not a requirement, i can think of one example in particular where a user pressed the action button once with one particular paint preset, then saved the canvas, entered it in a digital art contest, and then won.
But usually you would work with different edited variations of the preset over time. Like adjusting the brush size or the path length as time passes to build up an image rendition from a rough fill to a more detailed edge rendition. Or using other effects like image operations to additionally process a painted image, adding smears, melts, lighting effects, etc. Combining together different presets that simulate different traditional media effects, like charcoal or chalk area colorings with pencil or ink edge outline effects. Or colored paint with water drip simulations. Or building a detail mask and then simulating rubbing it with ink and then simulating applying that ink to a textured paper surface. The different combinational options are endless.
Indeed SA provides many different infinite sets. So in fact there are endless endless opportunities to explore.
In addition to the categories already suggested in the question and in John's answer and for that matter in the separate forum post on preset organization, I would point to a few additional ways of slicing the cake as it were.
One obvious but not well discussed line of demarcation is in SA is still images vs animations. Within Animations there are live streams and keyframes. Each takes a slightly different mindset and in my experience benefits from a different preset grouping.
My particular interest these past few months has been in the area of live performance - a sub (super?) set of live streaming. In this area I have been creating presets and preset collections that respond to pen tracking as well as tilt and pressure options. In a sense to return to the music analogy, these presets behave as if they were following the conductor's baton.
I agree, and I believe that John agrees, that the organization of presets needs some help. Ultimately though as John's answer suggests the relevant features and thus organizing principles are going to be very personal choices.
It would be possible to create a relational database of the presets and overlay a graphical interface that would display the presets in a constellation so that similar presets would be seen as close to the one in current use. However to be truly effective such an effort would require participation and input from a substantial percentage of the SA community. The presets would have to be ranked on several descriptive/differential parameters and meta-tags added in the custom html page descriptions.
A complicating problem is that there are close to 5000 presets and the program makes it wonderfully easy to create new ones. Making the task of keeping any initial organization upto date pretty much a full time Job.. is Synthetik hiring, John? :-)
P.S.
I do not mean to imply that an effort to improve the standard preset organization should not be undertaken.
And would some more collections organized like this be useful?
One thing that would be very useful to me in the naming of the brushes is what kind of sources they use: some brushes are good to use with a fixed color, others absolutely need a source image, something I rarely start with myself. Some introduce some variations in colors or texture. Some follow the source image's contours and work better with high contrast images...
I hope this makes some sense. I have to admit I never took the time to actually understand how SA brushes (patches?) work, I just try them more or less at random and keep or discard them based on what I like or don't like. It would be nice if they were organized and named in a way that helped me find them again afterwards ;-)