Watercolor Paper Texture

Thank you for the reply. My goal is very simple: to create a watercolor that looks like it was done on watercolor paper. SA 4 is giving great results on the painting side of the operation. But putting that painting on a watercolor paper (texture) is another story. This operation takes seconds to do on competing products. Liveart was nice enough to post an example in SA , but to be honest the texture displayed does not resemble any natural media paper I am aware of, appears complex and seems more useful for novel non-natural media work . The watercolor pre-sets that I find give nice results are in the new hand-drawn media category: cd_wc_graphic and cd_wc_blocks. Sometimes I use both of these, so that a post-processing step might be more realistic (I am sure there are others who use more than one pre-set the same digital painting). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I think the NagelSeries1Textures you refer to are actually Texture Synthesizer presets. There is a way to incorporate the texture synthesizer as a background texture generator in the Studio Artist paint synthesizer. So, you actually could use the nagel series texture synthesizer presets to build canvas textures for painting.

The easy part of that is to just set the Texture Type in the Background Texture control panel in the paint synthesizer to Texture Synthesizer. So if you choose one of the nagel texture synthesizer presets and make this edit then that nagel texture will be running in the background texture generator in the paint synthesizer.

The more difficult part of the equation is reconfiguring the paint preset so that the background texture is used in a way that will emulate a paper texture. My usual answer to this question, is, ok, just reedit the paint preset to use the background texture to emulate a paper texture, you could do this kind of edit, or that kind of edit, etc. But of course that's only going to make sense if you are pretty comfortable editing the paint synthesizer at a fairly low level. Which is probably not going to be the case when you are getting started, and it's a legitimate criticism that perhaps you should not have to drop down to that level of technical understanding to do this kind of edit.

So, i've been working on a few subtle additions to the paint synthesizer this afternoon to make this kind of edit easier for people like yourself. I think this new feature will help address your desire to have an easier way to take something like one of Crags's watercolor presets and add a paper or canvas texture to them.

We've also been working on adding some new paint synthesizer macro edit commands recently. These are single step commands that provide high level editing options for paint presets, like 'make wet' as one example. So we can add another one that would be named something like 'make background paper texture active'. So then you could just click a macro edit command in the paint synthesizer macro edit help page to make this kind of high level edit to any paint preset you choose from the factory set.

The caveat of this kind of high level edit is that it's going to take over the background texture engine in the paint synthesizer and use that to emulate the paper or canvas texture you want to incorporate into the preset. So, if the particular paint preset you choose is using the background texture part of the synthesizer to do something else, like help build a dynamic brush texture for example, then that part of the overall paint preset effect is going to go away since the background texture will now be used to emulate the paper texture.

I think the notion of extreme reconfigurability is what makes Studio Artist such an amazing program, since a designer of a particular paint effect is able to use different parts of the painting engine in many different ways, new ways that might not have even occurred to the designers of the program, which can lead to many interesting and amazing new visual effects that are just not possible in other paint programs that have a fixed non-reconfigurable rendering engine.

At the same time, i am listening to your criticism and desire for an easier way to make this kind of edit, and i think the subtle changes we just added will help to address those concerns. The new features i mentioned were incorporated into the 4.1 development code base this afternoon. but our plan is to migrate all of the 4.1 code changes that don't require the new 4.1 framework back to a 4.02 release build. So you should see these new changes when we release 4.02, which we hope to do in the fairly soon. We can set you up with a 4.02 beta as soon as we release it for testing if you would like.

I'll use Craig's watercolor presets for testing the macro edit part of this. So far the results look pretty good. Part of what makes the watercolor presets so cool is all of the complex wet mixing that takes place, so you need to cut that back to a certain extend if you want to not blend or wash out all of the paper texturing. I am noticing that if i cut it back so that you can still see the paper texture it can change the appearance of some kinds of wet paint effects, so some kinds of paint effects with really cool complex wet mixing might not be directly compatible with the notion of applying them to a simulated textured surface (without having the textured surface be fully covered over really quickly).

So for these kinds of paint presets, you might be better off with a post process when you are done painting to simulate the look of a canvas or paper texture. There's been a lot of discussion of how to do this kind of thing on the forum over the years, but it would be useful to try and collect that information and put in in one place rather than have to search around for it. So i'll try to get a tutorial tip up with some presets you can use to do this kind of thing later this week. It might take me a few days to pull it together so bear with me.

..............................
Here's my answer to a similar discussion on the forum earlier this year that i wanted to include here, since it provides some more background on the whole notion of the design philosophy of the paint synthesizer.
....

So there's more to that then just putting together a set of paper texture presets. Because you want those paper texture presets to be useable for any kind of paint preset. So the particular preset you are painting with would need to be built in a specific way to support that. Remember, Studio Artist' paint synthesizer is much more flexible then programs like Painter. It's not a hard coded paint engine - fixed rendering path, end of story. It's totally programable and configurable, so something like the background texture part of the paint synthesizer can be used in many different ways to build up a paint preset.

Now, you are totally free to restrict yourself to a set of paint presets that use something like the background texture in a very specific way, for paper surface simulation lets say. Painter's set of background texture 'presets' is really just a folder of small texture images that are tiled to simulate a paper texture. So you could put those images or images of your own choosing in a folder in the brush folder and use a image background texture to work with them. So then the file : paint synthesizer : new background image texture menu command is the equivalent of loading a paper texture 'preset'.

So in that sense the existing studio artist implementation totally supports what you want to do, but you'd have to constrain your set of working paint presets to support that. So maybe we could put together something like that, a small set of paint presets that work that way and some paper textures in the brush folder for people who are comfortable with that particular approach.

I'm going to digress a little for a moment and talk about tiling. Personally, i've always had a kind of personal dislike for working with tiled textures. The eye is very sensitive to being able to perceive repetition in an image, and images constructed from tiled textures have a non- organic mechanical or computer generated quality associated with them because of that.

The technical reason is that tiling an image to build a texture introduces very strong spatial frequency components associated with the tiling pattern. Those spikes of energy in the spatial frequency domain are something that highly stimulates the visual system, and would not be present in a real world organic texture pattern. That's why there are so many different procedural texture options in Studio Artist, so that you don't have to get stuck with working with images and tiling to represent brush nibs or to generate texture fields. And that's a big factor in the organic quality associated with many Studio Artist presets, be they paint presets, or MSG abstract imagery, or whatever.

Now we do of course support image source brushes, or image background textures. So people are free to build paint presets to their hearts content that use these particular features. The factory presets tend to not heavily use those particular features, and that has everything to do with what i just discussed above. We've probably been over biased in that regard, we could provide a lot more factory presets that use those paint synthesizer features.

Replies

liveart February 20, 2010 at 9:18pm

Nora there are many paths to a background texture in SA. Several posts in this forum have addressed quite a few of the different methods. Here are tow links to get you started:

https://studioartist.ning.com/forum/topics/paper-textures

https://studioartist.ning.com/forum/topics/paper-textures-in-sa

https://studioartist.ning.com/forum/topics/texturesynth-and-simplete...

https://studioartist.ning.com/photo/textured5b-1?page=1#comment-7171...
- Nora Laiken > liveart February 21, 2010 at 8:00am
  
  Thank you very much for the reply. However, to be honest, the recommendations are quite cryptic and a step by step explanation is needed. Adding paper texture is trivial in competing applications. If we can do more in SA itself (rather than simply save the jpg and add paper texture using another program), it needs to be spelled out.
Synthetik February 21, 2010 at 5:14pm

Are you referring to a paint preset category or a texture synth category for the nagel texture series you mention?

Do you want to create a textured paper effect as a post processing step after you are finished painting? Or are you trying to build the paper texturing into the watercolor paint preset itself? If you're interested in the second option, which watercolor presets are you interested in modifying?
- Nora Laiken > Synthetik February 21, 2010 at 6:17pm
  
  Thank you for the reply. My goal is very simple: to create a watercolor that looks like it was done on watercolor paper. SA 4 is giving great results on the painting side of the operation. But putting that painting on a watercolor paper (texture) is another story. This operation takes seconds to do on competing products. Liveart was nice enough to post an example in SA , but to be honest the texture displayed does not resemble any natural media paper I am aware of, appears complex and seems more useful for novel non-natural media work . The watercolor pre-sets that I find give nice results are in the new hand-drawn media category: cd_wc_graphic and cd_wc_blocks. Sometimes I use both of these, so that a post-processing step might be more realistic (I am sure there are others who use more than one pre-set the same digital painting). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
  - Synthetik > Nora Laiken February 21, 2010 at 7:13pm
    
    I think the NagelSeries1Textures you refer to are actually Texture Synthesizer presets. There is a way to incorporate the texture synthesizer as a background texture generator in the Studio Artist paint synthesizer. So, you actually could use the nagel series texture synthesizer presets to build canvas textures for painting.
    
    The easy part of that is to just set the Texture Type in the Background Texture control panel in the paint synthesizer to Texture Synthesizer. So if you choose one of the nagel texture synthesizer presets and make this edit then that nagel texture will be running in the background texture generator in the paint synthesizer.
    
    The more difficult part of the equation is reconfiguring the paint preset so that the background texture is used in a way that will emulate a paper texture. My usual answer to this question, is, ok, just reedit the paint preset to use the background texture to emulate a paper texture, you could do this kind of edit, or that kind of edit, etc. But of course that's only going to make sense if you are pretty comfortable editing the paint synthesizer at a fairly low level. Which is probably not going to be the case when you are getting started, and it's a legitimate criticism that perhaps you should not have to drop down to that level of technical understanding to do this kind of edit.
    
    So, i've been working on a few subtle additions to the paint synthesizer this afternoon to make this kind of edit easier for people like yourself. I think this new feature will help address your desire to have an easier way to take something like one of Crags's watercolor presets and add a paper or canvas texture to them.
    
    We've also been working on adding some new paint synthesizer macro edit commands recently. These are single step commands that provide high level editing options for paint presets, like 'make wet' as one example. So we can add another one that would be named something like 'make background paper texture active'. So then you could just click a macro edit command in the paint synthesizer macro edit help page to make this kind of high level edit to any paint preset you choose from the factory set.
    
    The caveat of this kind of high level edit is that it's going to take over the background texture engine in the paint synthesizer and use that to emulate the paper or canvas texture you want to incorporate into the preset. So, if the particular paint preset you choose is using the background texture part of the synthesizer to do something else, like help build a dynamic brush texture for example, then that part of the overall paint preset effect is going to go away since the background texture will now be used to emulate the paper texture.
    
    I think the notion of extreme reconfigurability is what makes Studio Artist such an amazing program, since a designer of a particular paint effect is able to use different parts of the painting engine in many different ways, new ways that might not have even occurred to the designers of the program, which can lead to many interesting and amazing new visual effects that are just not possible in other paint programs that have a fixed non-reconfigurable rendering engine.
    
    At the same time, i am listening to your criticism and desire for an easier way to make this kind of edit, and i think the subtle changes we just added will help to address those concerns. The new features i mentioned were incorporated into the 4.1 development code base this afternoon. but our plan is to migrate all of the 4.1 code changes that don't require the new 4.1 framework back to a 4.02 release build. So you should see these new changes when we release 4.02, which we hope to do in the fairly soon. We can set you up with a 4.02 beta as soon as we release it for testing if you would like.
    
    I'll use Craig's watercolor presets for testing the macro edit part of this. So far the results look pretty good. Part of what makes the watercolor presets so cool is all of the complex wet mixing that takes place, so you need to cut that back to a certain extend if you want to not blend or wash out all of the paper texturing. I am noticing that if i cut it back so that you can still see the paper texture it can change the appearance of some kinds of wet paint effects, so some kinds of paint effects with really cool complex wet mixing might not be directly compatible with the notion of applying them to a simulated textured surface (without having the textured surface be fully covered over really quickly).
    
    So for these kinds of paint presets, you might be better off with a post process when you are done painting to simulate the look of a canvas or paper texture. There's been a lot of discussion of how to do this kind of thing on the forum over the years, but it would be useful to try and collect that information and put in in one place rather than have to search around for it. So i'll try to get a tutorial tip up with some presets you can use to do this kind of thing later this week. It might take me a few days to pull it together so bear with me.
    
    ..............................
    Here's my answer to a similar discussion on the forum earlier this year that i wanted to include here, since it provides some more background on the whole notion of the design philosophy of the paint synthesizer.
    ....
    
    So there's more to that then just putting together a set of paper texture presets. Because you want those paper texture presets to be useable for any kind of paint preset. So the particular preset you are painting with would need to be built in a specific way to support that. Remember, Studio Artist' paint synthesizer is much more flexible then programs like Painter. It's not a hard coded paint engine - fixed rendering path, end of story. It's totally programable and configurable, so something like the background texture part of the paint synthesizer can be used in many different ways to build up a paint preset.
    
    Now, you are totally free to restrict yourself to a set of paint presets that use something like the background texture in a very specific way, for paper surface simulation lets say. Painter's set of background texture 'presets' is really just a folder of small texture images that are tiled to simulate a paper texture. So you could put those images or images of your own choosing in a folder in the brush folder and use a image background texture to work with them. So then the file : paint synthesizer : new background image texture menu command is the equivalent of loading a paper texture 'preset'.
    
    So in that sense the existing studio artist implementation totally supports what you want to do, but you'd have to constrain your set of working paint presets to support that. So maybe we could put together something like that, a small set of paint presets that work that way and some paper textures in the brush folder for people who are comfortable with that particular approach.
    
    I'm going to digress a little for a moment and talk about tiling. Personally, i've always had a kind of personal dislike for working with tiled textures. The eye is very sensitive to being able to perceive repetition in an image, and images constructed from tiled textures have a non- organic mechanical or computer generated quality associated with them because of that.
    
    The technical reason is that tiling an image to build a texture introduces very strong spatial frequency components associated with the tiling pattern. Those spikes of energy in the spatial frequency domain are something that highly stimulates the visual system, and would not be present in a real world organic texture pattern. That's why there are so many different procedural texture options in Studio Artist, so that you don't have to get stuck with working with images and tiling to represent brush nibs or to generate texture fields. And that's a big factor in the organic quality associated with many Studio Artist presets, be they paint presets, or MSG abstract imagery, or whatever.
    
    Now we do of course support image source brushes, or image background textures. So people are free to build paint presets to their hearts content that use these particular features. The factory presets tend to not heavily use those particular features, and that has everything to do with what i just discussed above. We've probably been over biased in that regard, we could provide a lot more factory presets that use those paint synthesizer features.
    - Nora Laiken > Synthetik February 21, 2010 at 7:47pm
      
      Thank you for the great reply ! I think there are many of us out there interested in natural media emulation who would welcome the updates mentioned. I will wait for 4.02 and look forward to testing this. It certainly would be a good idea to spell this out in the "Tips". Bottom line is that it should be easier to do this in SA than flip out to another program to utilize a texture.
      - liveart > Nora Laiken February 22, 2010 at 3:03am
        
        Nora.. do you have an example of the "watercolor paper" texture you are imagining? In my wet work I do watercolors, I have 6 different commercial and 3 handmade papers that I enjoy using not one of them looks like the other and several are so smooth as to have no texture at all.
        
        So before anyone can help with your question it really is important to know the goal. The separate post I did on adding texture via a gradient light layer composite is flexible enough to accomodate and allow you to generate any texture in the final image you would like. You could in fact take a photo of actual watercolor paper and use that as the "texture" layer if you wanted.
        
        Above is an example of using an image of arches professional watercolor paper to generate the "surface texture" for the work. if you look at the lower right you can even see the Arches Aquarelle embossing.
        
        here is the image before the imop
        
        Now getting the paint to interact with that "surface" while you are painting is a whole different kettle of fish.

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