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DECEMBER 20, 2002 Inside the Studio Artist Paint Synthesizer
Creating and using a Time Particle The initial creation phase of the Time Particle is a simple one. Either select a preset from the thousands supplied with Studio Artist, or create a preset of your own using the Paint Synthesizer. For tis particular tutorial, I'll be using a variety of Presets that can be found in the "Dave's alpha enabled presets" folder on your Studio Artist installation CD. If you have not already installed these presets, you might want to do so now. They're quite good and numerous (500 or so), and they all have lovely little preview icons that were labored over for hours. And I understand the guy who made them is a pretty swell dude.[an error occurred while processing this directive]The type of brush you use isn't terribly important: It can be simply an interactive pen for manual drawing or one of the various autodraw-style pens. Time Particles work with both automated and manual paint strokes. The one limitation on Time Particles seems to be the "Particle Paint" brush type, whose effects over time are a bit too random for our purposes. The type of source image you use is also irrelevant. Time Particles can be applied (rotoscoped) just as easily to video as they can be to still art. And, of course, they can also be applied to works created "from scratch" (for lack of a better phrase) or even recursively applied over and over to your artwork to generate some incredible variations that might not be possible without using Time Particles. Once you've chosen or created your Paint Patch in Studio Artist, move into the Paint Synthesizer workspace. In the Parameters pull-down menu, switch over to Time Particles. This setting is available for all presets in Studio Artist and is, by default, set to "Off." If you haven't already guessed, we're going to be switching this to "Time Particles."  For this example, I'm using some home-made presets, which are available for download separately in our "Weekly Download" feature at . After switching Time Particles on, I'm simply going to draw some strokes and then watch what happens when I animate the strokes. First things first. In order to use Time Particles, I have to record my strokes in the Paint Action Sequence Window. For this first example, I just want to see what's going on with the Time Particles, so I'm not going to do anything too fancy. Play along and follow these steps. 1. Open up the paint Action Sequence Window (Action > Paint Action Sequence Window). Click the Erase button to remove the default Paint Action Sequence (PASeq).  2. Click the Record button, and set the background to white so that the background will be set to white with each frame, erasing the contents of the previous frame. This isn't necessary for Time Particles, but in order to see what's going on, it helps.  3. Draw your strokes (or hit the "Action" button), and then uncheck the Record button when you're finished.  Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Film and Video Magazine • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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