|
|
FEBRUARY 19, 2004 Synthetik Studio Artist 3.0
Paint Synthesizer parameters As I mentioned, each of the base brush types can be used with any sort of brush you wish to create. What does that mean? Again, think back to your standard graphics application. If you use, say, the Airbrush tool in that application, what options do you have? Brush size, opacity, blending mode, maybe a little jitter or scattering. Not a whole lot. If you use Photoshop or Painter, you have quite a few more options. But again, Studio Artist exceeds them all. Not just in the volume of parameters, but in the inventiveness of the synthesis engine. I've shown you several examples of Studio Artist brushes, but they're nothing more than a tiny sample of some brushes that I thought you might find interesting. In reality, if I were to show you 300 sample brushes, that would be just barely 1 percent of just the presets included with the program and not even a fraction of the potential because there's no such thing as a fraction of infinity.[an error occurred while processing this directive]I'm not going to waste your time showing you every possible parameter that you can adjust in Studio Artist. We'll cover many of these in future articles dealing with specific techniques for using this program. As I mentioned previously, the are about 400 adjustable parameters (roughly twice the number from the previous version) in 27 parameter categories. Obviously the common parameters are among them--brush size, opacity, blending mode, etc. But Studio Artist also includes controls for many, many other brush behaviors. For example, the brush shape can be any type of image. It can be computational or generative. It can be text. Or it can be a movie. Then, within these parameters, there are dozens of settings to refine the look of the brush tip, such as randomness, noise, roundness and the like. It also includes procedurals that can be added to any type of brush with several different algorithms for generation, clipping, orientation, bias, gain, etc. And these settings are just for the shape of the nib itself. Change a couple of settings in the Brush Type parameters, and you go from a rough paint brush look like this:  To a creamy brush that resembles the markings on a koi.  That was two slider settings. Two out of 400 with an awful lot of variation available in between. Then, beyond just the shape of the nib, you have parameters for dealing with the way the nib processes color. Parameters for dealing with the lighting of the brush--3D lighting, flat lighting, specular lighting. Parameters for using the nib to process the canvas or source image. Modifiers for the look of the brush, like gradients, depth masking, sub-stroke compositing, texture, gradient generation, color clipping and randomization, color modulation and alpha fill. You can even use filter output as an integral part of your brush. (Studio Artist 3.0 includes a new plugin architecture called MSG, which we'll get to below. MSG plugins, aside from functioning much like Photoshop plugins, can be used as a component of a brush, with the effects painting into your stroke on the fly. There are hundreds of MSG filters included with the program.) Below you see one brush using six different lighting sources (out of the 19 available). Each of the lighting sources has about 55 sub-options for fine-tuning the appearance, including the height of the lighting, angle, elevation, specularity, lighting type, apply mode and modifiers.  Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DV Format • Film and Video Magazine • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
|