raiseTheRoof

Studio Artist V5.5.5 is almost out the door.  We're in our 'final' build stage, so all the features and associated code are locked down at this point, as we run 24 hour automated testing on multiple machines here to work it though it's paces.

I grabbed this in gallery show. It's basically all vectorizer with some dissipative smear provided by start cycle processing working off of bezier paths derived from the last automatic selection mask.

Read more…
Votes: 0
E-mail me when people leave their comments –

Comments

  • The Gallery Show Part of SA 5.5 is an amazing tool.
    I am playing around with GS (trial and error) about 3-4 month or so,
    and as a right-brained-user I must say: the complexity of settings drive me nuts,
    so my experiments have to go on;-) thank you for your wonderful program.
    I’m on SA 5.5.4 and I am pleased that the 555 is soon on the route…

  • Max, i emailed you a pre-release SA V5.5.5f2 app for mac download on sept 15th.  Did i get that wrong and you need a windows one?

    We're still doing some last minute cleanup tweaks associated with subtle issues uncovered in the last minute testing.  I'm sending out f4 builds today, so if you need windows let me know, otherwise i'll send the latest mac one to you.

    Gallery Show in V5.5.5 has a ton of new features, including way more auto-masking options.

     

    We were joking here that every copy of Studio Artist V.5 should ship with an additional copy of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategy cards.  Except it already does in some sense, in the form of Gallery Show and its various preference settings (and the other new generative features located higher up in the SA interface like the M mutate button in the Preset Browser).

    Part of the trick to wrapping your head around gallery show is to start thinking in terms of process.  Especially recursive processes.  When i keep blabbing on about Generative Strategies and Art Strategies, this is what i'm referring to.  You are specifying a recursive process when you setup the various gallery show settings, and then let it run.  Especially when you let it run over multiple cycles.

    I don't think it necessarily has to be a 'left brain' kind of thing.  I tend to approach it in very intuitive ways which would definitely be characterized as 'right brain' kinds of thinking.  But i also spend every day working with it, setting it up with some art strategy and then letting it run, then watching what it does very closely, then tweaking it to push it in new directions, or to push it more towards where i want it to go. So i have this mental model of how it works sitting inside of my brain that is guiding that intuitive approach to manipulating it.

    The source and style imagery you are working with is a huge factor, and i spend a lot of time putting together very focused folders of images to use for the source or for the style.  The focus may be the actual image content, or the textural or color qualities of it, or the 'internal dynamism' of the imagery, or playoff of different kinds of imagery, or....

    The particular visual effect types you are using in the various stages of gallery show processing (start cycle, main technique, end cycle) also have a huge influence on the results it generates.  How one is playing off dissipative forces vs laying down of color and marking forces for example.   How one is playing off the visual characteristics of the source vs the style imagery. Or...

    How one is working with auto-masking or just general spatially adaptive restriction of what is occurring is also very important.  Keep in mind that there are other approaches to this than just the selection mask in Studio Artist.  Individual effects can be programmed to be very locally spatially restrictive in intelligent ways based on the visual attributes of the signal input that is modulating that local adaption.  Gallery Show's generative algorithms are working with this automatically behind the scenes.

     

    I oftentimes use various data augmentation options we have built into gallery show that manipulate and transform that raw image source material.  SA V5.5.5 has more data augmentation options in it, both for the gallery show source and for the loaded style.  A very simple example of a data augmentation option would be the horizontal flip option.  And it does just that, it randomly flips a coin, and then based on the result horizontally flips the source image (or the style image) or not.

    There is also this whole other thing that can start happening with it in SA V5.5, where other things going on in gallery show can in some sense capture and start to internally manipulate the internal warp process going on with the random flip (or any other gallery show data augmentation option based on an internal warp effect).  It has to do with the extremely complex state space transitions occurring in a gallery show cycle, and some interactions that can occur between them on V5.5.

    Now in some sense this is actually a bug in the code.  Not a bug that causes a crash, a bug that leads to indeterminate output based on the current state of that state machine, and it's past history.  Any other imaging program by any other company would have just corrected the bug,  and then moved on with development.

    But the Synthetik Software and Studio Artist philosophy is such that if we find a bug that doesn't lead to crash oy leak or other bad behavior, but just changes the visual appearance of the output, and that visual appearance change is visually intersting, then we just make it am additional adjustable option in the program you can turn on or turn off.  because from the standpoint of a visual artist, we believe this makes the most sense.

    This leads into something i have said before.  Every version of Studio Artist has different generative behavior.  So when you run Gallery Show in different release versions, like SA V5.5.4 vs V5.5.5, the generative output behavior is different.  because the properties of the generative ai running it behind the scenes are different.

    So, if you become very personally attached to how gallery show is working in any given release version, you probably want to keep around both versions because of that.

    This is a very different way of thinking than how one would approach other programs. No one keeps around a specific update version of photoshop because they love the unique individuality of how that update works.  They just always grab the latest update because it fixes the bugs, and the feature set might be expanding as versions update, but the overall aesthetic qualities of the program aren't personalized to a level where one could become attached to the output for a particular update.

    Oblique Strategies
    Oblique Strategies (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) is a card-based method for promoting creativity jointly created by musician/artis…
This reply was deleted.

You need to be a member of Studio Artist to add comments!

Join Studio Artist