There's been some discussion recently about generating splatter paint effects using image or movie brushes. With the goal of doing this with lighting effects build into the paint.
Here's an example of a splatter image generated by Bernard that incorporates 3D lighting to give it more volume.
So the question is, how can you put this paint effect together to incorporate the lighting shading, but build the paint so it overlays rather than blends.
The key to doing this is that the alpha mask can be different than the RGB channels of the brush image. So you build the alpha channel to mask the splatter shape. the volume or lighting shading gradients are in the RGB image for the brush, not the alpha channel.
So, let's assume the last image you posted above is the splatter brush image. Using the Threshold ip op, i can generate a mask of the splatter shape to use as the alpha channel.
So i wrote out a brush image using above. The RGB channels look like below
and the alpha channel of the brush image looks like the mask i generated above.
I used a PNG image format to write out the brush image, this one works well for images that contain alpha.
Now i'm making things way more difficult for myself by making the RGB part of this brush colored, it would be way better to make it grayscale. But we'll deal with that in the paint synthesizer programming.
I setup a paint synthesizer preset to use this image brush. So Brush Source is set to be an Image Source.
My Brush Type is set to be Source Alpha Brush.
I setup the Paint Fill Setup control panel as shown below.
I can't use Paint Color for Fill From, or the shading will vanish. So i used Paint Brush Load so i could incorporate it into the brush nib image.
The Paint Brush Load control panel was setup like below.
I'm using the brush as the Source. So the RGB channels of the brush image are being used here. I then use BW Convert since that RGB brush image was blue colored as opposed to being grayscale, so this gets rid of that coloring and converts it to grayscale. i then use the Paint Color HueSatSet algorithm to colorize the grayscale shaded brush image.
Note that when i paint with this new preset, i get the colorized shaded splatter brush nibs. And they overlay without blending, which is what you wanted (i think)
Now to do this totally correctly, you probably want a slight bit of anti-aliasing associated with the alpha channel mask for the splatter brush. You could use a Smooth Threshold rather than a Hard Threshold to get this (with a small soft ramp). Or you could apply a small amount of blur or feathering to the hard contrast mask image.
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Great John ! Thanks for the lesson !
That is exactly what I wanted.
My version of SA (4.06a6), doesn't incude the Render parameter in the Threshold IOP. Did I miss something in the discussion?
Everything i discussed in this little tutorial works in Studio Artist 4. However, i was using a beta of v5 when i put it together, so that Render option is a new one in v5. It's Raster setting would be the way Threshold works in v4.
How can I convert in SA a brush raster in vectorizer like this ?
with illustrator I can convert it in alpha, but that doesn't work as an import in Art Text :
Art Text :
If you want to convert an already flat color image into vector output, you can use the Flat Input Technique in the vectorizer. Typically you want to turn off all of the input filtering options when you do this, since they are going to distort the representation.
You might want to try making the paint stroke larger than normal so that you can get a good representation of all of the fine detail when you vectorize it. So you'd scale up the texture as well as the size of it, and then vectorize that.
Flat Input Technique is going to vectorize everything so the white background and all of the holes in the paint stroke will also be vector regions. If you just want to vectorize the black part of the stroke, you could use the Outline Technique with the Outline Type set to Selection. Before running it, you could put the paint stroke in the selection buffer. And invert it, so that the paint stroke is full white on a black background, since only the 255 white parts of the selection buffer will vectorize with this option.
Thanks.
How can I put the stroke in the selection buffer ? With selection Tool ? Or direct with the paint synthesizer
OK then I invert, and outline technique, type set to selection.
Canvas : Selection :Set to menus have different options for setting the selection buffer. So you could set it to the Canvas. Here's a paint stroke i tried vectorizing this way after i read your original question.