I wanted to start a new discussion here focused on both what we're working on as far as upcoming MSG developments go, and to allow people to chime in with their suggestions for new MSG features they would like to see us add in the next Studio Artist release. Now is a great time to chime in with those suggestions, since i'm currently knee deep working on new MSG features right now.
And there are a lot of new MSG features under development.
I have to confess, there was a time where i wondered if we were going to continue developing MSG at all. Was it still relevant to where we were heading?
Those thoughts have long passed me by. My current viewpoint is that MSG is a secret weapon, a literal treasure chest containing a vast repository of different visual effect and generative synthesis algorithms.
Dr Science's cabinet of intellectual visual curiosities? Perhaps. But also so much more. The penultimate procedural pattern and texture generation system. That is also a fully reconfigurable modular image processing system. That also happens to be an abstraction wrapper that allows evolution algorithms to manipulate both individual MSG processors and processor chains. Complete with a full population of manipulatable MSG presets to sample from in the form of the MSG Evolution Editor.
One can of course use MSG presets directly as visual effects (both generative and filtering effects). But they can also be an underlying user-reconfigurable component inside of practically everything else in Studio Artist.
The Paint Synthesizer has always been able to embed MSG presets internally. MSG Brush Load, MSG Live Source Brush, MSG derived PathStart and Path Shape.
Dual Mode Paint also allowed you to use MSG presets as an internal dual operation. A lot of the factory DualMode Paint presets use custom MSG presets for dual op warp and the effects.
In the next version of Studio Artist currently under development you can now embed MSG directly into a Vectorizer preset. Suddenly everything you can do in MSG has the potential to be output as vector graphics if you want that. Or you can view the Vectorizer render engine as a way to extend the visual appearance of a MSG derived effect. Or you are embedding MSG inside of a Vectorizer preset that is being designed to then be embedded into a Paint Synthesizer preset.
We're adding new MSG processors. So feel free to suggest new things (or old things we missed) that you would like to see us include in the MSG processor library.
MSG didn't work directly with the new Style features in V5.5. We want to fix that in V6. By opening the MSG architecture up to Style Modulation.
There are a lot of new features in the MSG Evolution Editor. New ways to interactively evolve the population of MSG presets contained in the preview cells of the Evolution Editor. Including new crossover algorithms for evolving new processor chains.
The Evolution Editor is now integrated into Gallery Show in different ways. You can of course manually interact with the Evolution Editor in real time while Gallery Show techniques build visual effects by sampling the MSG preset population within the Evolution Editor. But you can also let Gallery Show generative ai steer the boat, using generative ai to evolve new MSG presets inside of the Evolution Editor while it is running MSG Evolution Editor based techniques at the same time.
I've been calling this MSG Drifting. The whole notion of drifting through the possible MSG parameter space while gallery show is working off of the sampling pattern created by the drift. Even if the generative ai is controlling the drift, you can still jump in manually to do some hand steering of the boat if you wish at any time.
There are many other things we're working on as well. More on those later.
Again, i'd love to hear suggestions from people who use MSG about what they would like to see added, fixed, whatever.
Or if you don't use MSG, you're welcome to explain why you find it too obtuse or whatever so we understand that here.
We're building out new QuickEdit commands for MSG so that people will be able to build or edit MSG related things without necessarily having to do it by manipulating raw processor atoms in the MSG Advanced Editor.
And part of the goals for the new Evolution Editor features is to really extend the range of creative possibilities you can implement there for non technical users.
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I love MSG!!! It's one of my favorite things in Studio Artist. I use it in lots of ways. My only suggestion (don't take it, it would be difficult to implement) would be to have the option to view the routings between modules as a node-based editor to better visualize the connections.
A node based editor doesn't make a whole lot of sense for us. Because it doesn't match the logical structure of how our system works.
Let's look at the underlying structure of both MSG and PASeq in studio artist, and see how it is conceptually different from a CS tree data structure, which is what node based editors are derived off of.
MSG (modular synthesized graphics) and PASeq (paint action sequences) are similar in some respects in that both consist of a sequential list of processing actions. So they are like a program.
In MSG the actions are the individual MSG processors.
In PASeq the actions are Studio Artist effect actions ( automatic or manual).
The sequential list of actions is run sequentially in order.
Each action takes some 'signal' as input, and outputs another signal. The signals are images in the case of PASeq (usually). So the current canvas layer, the source image, the style image, the selection buffer, all of these can be used as the input and the output for the PASeq action. PASeq action steps can also output bezier paths to the current bezier path frame. And some PASeq actions process the current bezier path frame bezier paths as input and then place them back int e bezier path frame as output.
MSG is similar. Signals (images, color palettes, color gradients) are Streams on a Bus. You can route individual ones into a given MSG processors input ports, and route the output back out of an output port back into the Stream on the Bus.
You can think of the image or stream buffers in either case as being like registers. And the actions are steps in a program. So our internal model is more like a Turing machine. You are really defining a program when you record your actions. The steps in the program (actions or processors) are grabbing things from registers, running some computation, and then placing the results back in registers.
i just used the msg evolution editor for the first time with dual paint mode because i read about it on here. it was a really powerful combo and i found the results very interesting. i was once using the evolution editor and advanced editor to make a keyframe animation from the animation memories and there was a movie loaded in the source window. it seemed like the different frames were changing as the animation was running and i was getting more than just an animation of a still frame. is that possible? i need things to be fairly easy to work with but i like the element of chance mixed with some control.
What the source movie frame time does or does not do in an animation run is determined by the File : Source Settings flags. Advance on loop action will advance from where it starts in the frame counter as the animation progresses. If you also have the synch to timeline one on then it will exactly track the frame time of the animation. If they are off then it just stays where it is, but you could move it around manually as the animation progresses.
Process always starts at the beginning of the source movie and runs through all of the frames.