Posted by Synthetik on September 28, 2008 at 1:07am
I reworked the pickover chaotic attractor MSG preset so that it generates an alpha mask for the chaotic attractor. i then made a movie brush with an embedded alpha channel of various alpha matted chaotic attractors and used that in the paint synthesizer.
I think this is somewhat more effective than the previous example because the matted chaotic attractors have a more painterly feel. I think this approach will actually be pretty effective, and there's a million different variations to this kind of approach you could generate using MSG.
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Really like both this and previous.
In attrTest3 (hamburger in a bun? ) and AttrFace2 the effect is great but the process mindboggling. I may be alone in thinking this, but only a few would really understand what you are talking about or be able to reproduce similar with v.4. These are the kinds of processes that would lend themselves to a tutorial for a clearer understanding.
I'm going to put together some kind of tutorial associated with how i created the whole process that lead to this.
There are a few different approaches you can take. I took the movie brush approach because i wanted to use a set of finished centered attractors i had created via directed evolution in the MSG evolution editor. But i could have taken a completely different approach and just used the MSG preset directly via MSG Brush Load in the paint synthesizer. The advantage to this is that you can get an infinite number of different brush shapes by using temporal generators (TG) to drive the editable parameters associated with the pickover attractor.
The disadvantage with this particular approach is that if you have ever tried to animate a chaotic attractor, they tend to be very sensitive to perturbations of their parameters. So rather than smoothly animating between different configurations they sputter out as the parameters interpolate between different positions.
I also used additional processing on the individual attractor images i created for my database. I added some gradient lighting and sharpening via ip ops prior to saving the attractor images created from evolving the msg preset. I also manually centered and sized each attractor by editing the associated msg parameters.
Part of why i try out these various projects (in addition to the try something new creative aspect) is that its a good way to debug any potential problems. And in fact i did run into a few issues associated with the embedded alpha channel process for msg presets i'd like to smooth out and fix. I ended up doing it in a round-a-bout fashion. I made a paint synthesizer preset that used the msg brush load and region fill as brush pen mode with the full screen region generator and 1 path start (as opposed to just running msg directly). I did this so i could paint the alpha masked portion of the canvas white. I then used a global canvas color selection to select pure white, and then inverted the selection, so that the selection then corresponded to the alpha mask. I did this to get around an issue associated with direct alpha rendering for msg presets that will be fixed soon. So this was probably the trickiest part of the whole process, but like i said that part will be cleaned up so you can just run the msg op mode and get the alpha channel directly mapped to the current layer.
I had my movie preferences setup to build an embedded alpha channel for movie output off of the current region selection. This is because i was building the alpha matte for my movie output in the region selection buffer as opposed to the layer alpha channel. And of course whenever you make a movie with an embedded alpha channel you need to make sure you use a compression codec that supports embedded alpha. I used animation codec millions+ as my codec.
So it probably seems even more confusing after this explanation. But in reality it's not too bad, especially after you've goon through the whole process once. So i think guided by a step by step tutorial you could follow the same process i did to make your own custom brushes. As i said, i'll try to post some more information soon on the specific steps i took to create this.
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In attrTest3 (hamburger in a bun? ) and AttrFace2 the effect is great but the process mindboggling. I may be alone in thinking this, but only a few would really understand what you are talking about or be able to reproduce similar with v.4. These are the kinds of processes that would lend themselves to a tutorial for a clearer understanding.
There are a few different approaches you can take. I took the movie brush approach because i wanted to use a set of finished centered attractors i had created via directed evolution in the MSG evolution editor. But i could have taken a completely different approach and just used the MSG preset directly via MSG Brush Load in the paint synthesizer. The advantage to this is that you can get an infinite number of different brush shapes by using temporal generators (TG) to drive the editable parameters associated with the pickover attractor.
The disadvantage with this particular approach is that if you have ever tried to animate a chaotic attractor, they tend to be very sensitive to perturbations of their parameters. So rather than smoothly animating between different configurations they sputter out as the parameters interpolate between different positions.
I also used additional processing on the individual attractor images i created for my database. I added some gradient lighting and sharpening via ip ops prior to saving the attractor images created from evolving the msg preset. I also manually centered and sized each attractor by editing the associated msg parameters.
Part of why i try out these various projects (in addition to the try something new creative aspect) is that its a good way to debug any potential problems. And in fact i did run into a few issues associated with the embedded alpha channel process for msg presets i'd like to smooth out and fix. I ended up doing it in a round-a-bout fashion. I made a paint synthesizer preset that used the msg brush load and region fill as brush pen mode with the full screen region generator and 1 path start (as opposed to just running msg directly). I did this so i could paint the alpha masked portion of the canvas white. I then used a global canvas color selection to select pure white, and then inverted the selection, so that the selection then corresponded to the alpha mask. I did this to get around an issue associated with direct alpha rendering for msg presets that will be fixed soon. So this was probably the trickiest part of the whole process, but like i said that part will be cleaned up so you can just run the msg op mode and get the alpha channel directly mapped to the current layer.
I had my movie preferences setup to build an embedded alpha channel for movie output off of the current region selection. This is because i was building the alpha matte for my movie output in the region selection buffer as opposed to the layer alpha channel. And of course whenever you make a movie with an embedded alpha channel you need to make sure you use a compression codec that supports embedded alpha. I used animation codec millions+ as my codec.
So it probably seems even more confusing after this explanation. But in reality it's not too bad, especially after you've goon through the whole process once. So i think guided by a step by step tutorial you could follow the same process i did to make your own custom brushes. As i said, i'll try to post some more information soon on the specific steps i took to create this.