Gallery Show is a new feature available in version 4 of Studio Artist. What it lets you do is run a continuous randomized Studio Artist performance. You could use it to do things like put together a customized automatic painting display using a dedicated computer like an iMac or a digital photo frame. Or you could use it to automatically generate custom artwork and/or mutated paint preset collections.
Studio Artist provides extensive support for all of the features of Wacom pens and tablets. All Wacom pen tablets provide pen pressure modulation. As you press the pen into the tablet you can modulate paint parameters based on how hard you are pressing in while drawing. There is also a pen eraser tip that can be used to switch on the fly to a second eraser paint preset when painting.
The Intuos series of Wacom tablets also provide additional pen tilt and tilt orientation modulation. This gives you 2 additional degrees of interactive modulation based on how you hold and orient the pen while drawing.
Additional devices are available for Intuos tablets that provide even more interactive modulation. The Airbrush pen with it’s integral thumb wheel modulator provides an additional degree of modulation on Intuos tablets. The ArtPen can also be used with Intuos tablets to provide an additional pen barrel axis rotation modulator. The 4D mouse can be used with Intuos tablets to provide a thumb wheel and mouse rotation modulators.
MSG stands for modular synthesized graphics. MSG is a modular image processing architecture that allows you to build essentially an infinite number of different image or video processing effects or abstract procedural art images or animations. MSG presets can generate abstract procedural art from scratch, or can be configured to process a source image or video frame in some way.
MSG presets can be used as stand alone effects. They can also be encapsulated into paint synthesizer presets for use in interactive or automatic painting in many different ways. You can paint with MSG Live source brushes, MSG Brush Load paint nib generation, MSG path start scanning, or MSG path shape generation.
Beginning Studio Artist users often just select a paint preset, hit Action, let the preset draw, stop the drawing, finished painting. However, by working with the controls in the paint synthesizer you can tweak any given preset to modify it’s rendition of the source image you are painting. This can be useful to focus on certain areas of the painting, to increase edge rendition, better portray positive and negative space, etc. This tutorial will focus on some common editing techniques you can use to modify the way a preset paints to better reproduce edges, positive and negative space, etc.
The Texture Synthesizer provides a way to create resolution independent texture field based effects. It can also be used as a modulator in many Image Operations, or as a background texture module in the paint synthesizer.
Image Operations (Ip Op) are image processing effects. There are a large number of them currently in Studio Artist (71 when this tip was written). While this may seem large, the actual number of different visual effects you can generate with these Ip Ops is much larger. Many Ip Op effects have adjustable algorithm parameters that can totally change what any given Ip Op effect does. By working with different Ip Op effects and adjusting their internal editable parameters you can create an extremely wide range of different visual effects useful for processing 2D images or video.
The Studio Artist Vectorizer takes a raster image and converts it into a flat color vector representation. The vectorization process can either try to mimic the source as closely as possible (example above), or can be configured to create a wide range of different stylistic effects (example below).
The vectorizer output can be inserted as a rendered raster image into the current canvas layer, as bezier paths into the current layer’s bezier path frame, or output to an external encapsulated postscript (EPS) file.
Typically the paint synthesizer auto-draws by generating a paint path and then painting it in. This process repeats individual path by path. However, you can configure the paint synthesizer to analyze the source image, construct a series of automatically generated regions, and then fill in each region with different kinds of paint patterns. In this tutorial we’ll review how to setup the paint synthesizer to create paint regionization effects.
The image below is an example of a photo mosaic image created by using a movie brush in the paint synthesizer. This tip will walk you through how to create your own custom movie brush which you can then use to create your own custom photo mosaic effects in the paint synthesizer.
MSG (modular synthesized graphics) is Studio Artist’s modular image processing architecture. 500 different image processing modules (called processors) are available within MSG and can be combined together to create an infinite variety of different image synthesis or processing effects. MSG can be used to create abstract procedural imagery or animations from scratch. Or MSG can also be used to create custom image processing or video special effects.
