MSG Processor count at 460 and climbing

MSG continues to evolve in Studio Artist dev 4. We just broke 460 different MSG processors today. There's a lot of exciting new stuff we're adding as well as enhancements to the older MSG processors. One thing i'm really excited about is that as the number of different processors expands the range of styles you can evolve when generating procedural art continues to expand as well. The great thing about directed evolution for creating abstract art (like in MSG Evolver) is that you are able to come up with processor combinations and stylistic effects you would never think of or have any idea how to manually construct. If there are additional MSG processors you would like to see added to Studio Artist and MSG Evolver feel free to speak up. For example, the conversations on the forum about recursive affine transformations to create fractal textures lead to some new MSG processors.

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  • We broke 480 different MSG processors today. I guess when we hit 500 we have to do a release, ha,ha.
    • Hi John,
      Can you please make it in Evolver like you did with SA where processing won't stop by clicking on the interface, but unless you tell it to stop?
    • Hi John, can you also please make Evolver have a source FPS pass-through option like SA does?
  • i hate to admit this but much of the time, i have absolutely no idea what is being talked about in these forums- i have no training in art, much less computer or digital processing- what i have learned so far has pretty much been by hands on experience, but i do want to better understand what you are talking about since i think im ready for that now, can you, john, or anybody else in the group suggest some basic texts or whatever, to get me started on an education about this medium that i have gotten addicted to but know so woefully little about? thanks
    • What specific things are you having trouble wrapping you head around?

      There's the terminology that gets thrown around obviously. And i think there are also some conceptual things we banter about that people with a music synthesis background pick up really quickly, like signal flow-routing and modulation for example. I'll try to think about some good resources, and feedback about concepts that are flying over your head are things myself and other can try to discuss in more depth.

      There are a wide range of different people that read the forum, so it's easy for those of us who have been doing this for years or have advanced degrees in signal processing to ramble on about arcane topics. But that's part of the fun too, the whole point of the forum is for people to feel free to ask about something they don't understand and different people can take a stab at answering or we can spin off a tutorial thread, etc.

      I've been thinking that it might make sense to try and put together a real beginning guide to image and signal processing for artists. Is this kind of what you are looking for? Or is there a lot of art terminology that is blowing over your head as well?

      MSG specifically stands for 'modular synthesized graphics'. Each MSG processor is a kind of image processing effect. They can be hooked together to build more sophisticated effects. You can also use them to build procedural or generative art work or animations. What that means is that rather than painting an abstract image or manipulating it yourself, you can work at a level of abstraction where you hookup different processing modules to create the visual effect.

      Obviously to fully understand this you need to have some understanding of signal processing or image processing. But the whole MSG architecture is designed so that people with no technical background can still create MSG effects and procedural art in MSG Evolver using 'directed evolution' What that means is that you can choose presets you like and new sets are generated automatically through different evolution algorithms that are based on biological components of evolution. So you can automatically mutate editable parameters. Or you could automatically swap processors. Both operations can be thought of as modifying the DNA of the MSG preset to create variations on the original effect you liked and chose to evolve new presets from.

      So you can use MSG at the level of working with the 16 square evolution grid in MSG Evolver to create abstract art or different processing presets without having any understanding of what is going on under the hood.

      The beginning of the MSG Evolver User Guide pdf talks about the underlying MSG architecture and what you can do with it. That's a good place to start, even if you just skim it and skip through places that get too technical. The actual part of the user guide that discusses each individual processor is probably not a good place to start. I think we do have a need for a getting started with MSG guide for people who are not real technical.
    • i think what i could use is some sort of glossary- it isnt that im afraid of mucking around with the processor i enjoy doing that and just spent 4 hours on it awhile ago, getting a few really fascinating images- but i get lost in the discussions of this and alot of sa in general and a glossary of terms would be great ( not that im asking anyone to develop one)
      it would just help explain what im doing when im doing it
  • That is very exciting! Do you have a possible projected time for when SA v4 is released?
    • Well, it's usually better not to get too specific since things are always subject to change due to factors beyond our immediate control. I think we'll have a better sense of release schedules, etc later on this year. Studio Artist dev 4 has some pretty exciting new features in it, so we do want to get those out to people for them to use.
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