New MSG Group

[Synthetik]

The purpose for this group is for people to discuss issues related to MSG. I'm very interested in how people are using MSG, both in MSG Evolver and in Studio Artist. So feel free to speak up, especially with regards to new features or processing modules you would like to see us add. If you aren't familiar with MSG, it stands for modular synthesized graphics. It's a preset based plugin format for creating your own custom effects. There are a large number of processing modules that can be hooked together to create custom image processing or video effects. Or you can use the processing modules to create abstract art or animation. A good place to get started is to read the beginning of the MSG Evolver user guide pdf, which talks a lot about the MSG architecture. MSG Evolver is a separate application from Studio Artist and is sitting in your Studio Artist 3.5 folder. The MSG User Guide is sitting in the documentation folder in your Studio Artist folder. So, you can use MSG Evolver to create custom abstract art. The interface takes advantage of user driven selective evolution. So you can click on one of the msg preset icons and the 16 cell grid will update with mutated versions of that preset you clicked. You can evolve msg presets via parameter evolution, which doesn't change the overall msg processing modules or how they are hooked up. Or you can do insert of swap evolution which modifies the actual processing modules themselves in addition to mutating the associated editing parameters for the modules. MSG Evolver is actually a pretty powerful application. You can do extensive editing of a msg preset in the processor chain editor window. You can do something called art mapping, which allows you to use a msg preset along with a database of images or movies to create custom photo mosaic or movie mosaic effects. the cool thing abouyt this is that the individual mosaic elements can be msg processing presets as opposed to just static images or movies, so the creative possibilities with art mapping are pretty extreme. You can also create animation or process movies in MSG Evolver using individual msg presets or a set of msg presets stored in animation memories that keyframe interpolate over time. You can also process live video from a firewire video camera with MSG Evolver. Temporal Generators (TG) can be added to individual msg processor editable parameters, and TG's will time animate those parameters over time. I really love to use MSG Evolver to create abstract procedural art using directed evolution. I know many users got really excited with the movie mosaic capabilities of the art-mapping section. Feel free to talk about how you are using MSG in your own work, and how you feel it should be improved in the future.

[Donna Kuhn]

i use msg evolver to create image and video processing effects and i am quiet fond of the animation memories but i would like to understand more about what they actually do. i have been using a still image and circular displacement effects to warp the image and then click my favorites into the animation memory boxes and then generate a movie. sometimes i will then run that movie through again with a preset or bring it into sa to handpaint the frames. i had been sticking to 10 frame increments and end up with 71 frames. today i doubled the frame increments and felt like i was seeing more of the various images i had seen while evolving and some i never saw before. if you could explain interpolating that would be helpful and do the separate animation memory boxes actually store more than just the image you click in there? i have used art mapping some but couldn't recreate the amazing effect in one of the old blog's tutorials of dancers dancing with other movies playing in their bodies. i could only show the first frame of other movies loaded in. i am planning to start the "cool preset" group tomorrow if nobody beats me to it along with making my first presets and paseqs available.

[Synthetik]

The idea was to try and make the msg evolver animation memories a simple way to build animations. so the frame increment is the number of frames to interpolate from one animation memory to the next one. so if you put in 20, and have the first 2 memories filled with msg presets, then you would get 21 frames output, since the increment takes you from a given memory to right before starting on the next one.

what happens is that any parameters that are different between 2 memories are interpolated. so by adding more frames between memories you slow down the interpolation.

internally, it looks at each individual processor in the preset's processor chain and examines the parameters for each processor in the 2 animation memories and then does linear interpolation between those 2 values over the frame spacing of the animation memories you have specified. each animation memory stores a complete msg preset, which means the processor chain that defines the preset and the associated color gradients and color palettes. so the color gradients and color palettes interpolate as well as the processor parameters.

msg evolver will let you place msg presets in adjacent animation memories that could have a completely different internal processor chains. this could be a different processor in a given processor chain index, or even different numbers of processors in the presets in the 2 adjacent memories. with this kind of interpolation you will get a big visual jump when it gets to the next memory since it can't really interpolate between different processor structures. It only knows how to interpolate parameters in individual processors, so it will try to do the best it can if the processors are actually different.

msg evolver 1.0 also only has sliders and efields to do the parameter editing, even for parameters that would be better served with popups for their editing, ie parameters where each integer value signifies a different algorithm or effect or something that doesn't edit in a smooth way. so again, if interpolating those parameters you will get jumps when the parameter changes by integer values.