Tag Archives: digital painting

What is Studioartist.posterous.com ?

There seems to be an endless thirst for more tutorial information on how to use the many features contained within Studio Artist.  So i thought i’d try setting up this new site so that i could quickly post short tips, tutorials, instructional hints, etc during the day as i’m working.  I’m always trying out new approaches to generating different artistic effects in Studio Artist, so some posts may consist of art experiments i’m currently working on along with some information about how the particular effect was created. Others may focus on adjusting and editing various Studio Artist features. The goal will be to quickly get new information posted on a daily basis. What is Studio Artist? If you aren’t familiar with Studio Artist, you really should be.  Studio Artist is an amazing digital art program written by myself and distributed by Synthetik Software Inc. The original release of Studio Artist occurred over 10 years ago in 1999, and the subsequent years have seen many additional software updates and releases as well as a vast amount of feature and workflow enhancements. This should make it obvious that Studio Artist is a rather extensive program with a wide range of features that has been under continuous development and enhancement for over 10 years.  It is extremely full featured, and is really a very flexible creative environment you can use to create an unlimited range of different visual artistic effects. Studio Artist transcends a lot of traditional ‘marketing’ limitations imposed on other programs that claim to be devoted to digital art. You can generate 2D artwork in Studio Artist, you can manipulate and process digital photos, but you can also generate movie and animation output. You can generate animation from scratch, or you can automatically process existing movie files to create custom paint animation or different video processing effects. You can generate and process raster imagery, but you can also work with vector effects and create vector file output.   You can do all the work manually, or you can use intelligent automatic features that allow Studio Artist to do the work for you. Studio Artist is unique in that it was the first commercial digital art program to incorporate visual modeling and artificial visual intelligence. Studio Artist is able to look at and analyze a digital image or series of frames in a video file in similar ways to how your brain’s visual cortex analyses and processes visual imagery (using internal visual modeling routines based on the results of academic research into cognitive visual neuroscience and the nature of visual perception). Studio Artist understands how to paint and draw. Most users sit somewhere in the middle of this continuum of manual painting vs fully automatic painting, manually directing and interactively controlling Studio Artist while still taking advantage of it’s automatic painting capabilities. Studio Artist doesn’t limit or restrict how you use it.  You can do everything yourself, you can let it help you while interactively directing it, or you can sit back, press a button, and let Studio Artist do all the work for you. Studio Artist incorporates a lot of ideas and working concepts originally developed in music synthesis and brings them to computer graphics and digital painting. Concepts like user programable presets, interactive modulation of editable parameters, signal routing, modular design of image processing and paint effects, visual performance. Studio Artist is called a graphics synthesizer because of this, analogous to a music synthesizer. Musicians are often are able to quickly grasp how Studio Artist works because of this. Studio Artist is unique in that every other digital art program i’ve ever used requires you to do all the work. Because of that they can often be tedious and time consuming to work with. Creating visual imagery in those other programs is ‘work’ and a chore and often frustrating because of that fact. For example, I’ve read tutorials for creating digital paint effects in certain other popular image processing programs that require 5 pages of explanation, 26 steps, and 13 different layers to create some stylistic paint look you could achieve in about 15 seconds of interactive painting in Studio Artist. The bottom line is that Studio Artist is fun to use, can actively and intelligently help you create and generate artistic visual imagery, and allows you to build up digital art with rich organic complexity very quickly.  Sometime traditional artists with a lot of years devoted to study of traditional drawing techniques can initially feel intimidated or threatened by the concept of automatic drawing. If you already know how to paint and draw, you should not be afraid of the automatic drawing features available in Studio Artist. You can choose to just ignore them if you wish, or use them to aid in repetitive tasks like building up shading via cross hatching. Studio Artist’s many intelligent automatic paint features also aid in creating a wide range of truly organic looking paint effects that simulate the complexity and richness of expression found in traditional natural media and art generation techniques. Natural media and art in general is all about ‘happy accidents’, and Studio Artist creates a digital environment where that kind of unexpected creative magic can happen.  If you don’t really know how to manually paint or draw, Studio Artist can open up a whole new world of artistic expression to you that is simply unavailable in other digital paint programs. You can use Studio Artist’s intelligent painting capabilities to assist you while you interactively paint.  Or you can use fully automatic painting, where you press the ‘Action’ button and let Studio Artist do all the work. You can instantly start creating interesting and compelling artwork without taking years to learn the muscle movements needed to create satisfactory results with traditional sketch and painting styles. If you are an animator or film editor, Studio Artist opens up a whole range of visual animation and video processing effects that would be cost prohibitive for anyone lacking a huge budget to hire teams of professionsal animators. This is because Studio Artist understands how to automatically paint and draw in an essentially limitless range of different visual aesthetic styles. You can work with a single frame of video to build a stylistic paint effect, and then automatically process a complete movie file with the stylistic effect you created.  The end result is paint animation that looks hand painted, but was created in a fraction of the time it would take to do this kind of work using traditional hand animation working frame by frame. We find that many video professionals that use Studio Artist behind the scenes make a point of keeping it a secret and not telling their clients about it.  Perhaps because they prefer to bill their clients for manual animation time when the work is really being done automatically within Studio Artist. For example, Studio Artist enabled filmmaker and director David Kaplan to create his Sundance award winning feature length animated film ‘Year of the Fish’ in a relatively short timeframe within the very tight budget constraints associated with independent film making. David used Studio Artist’s automatic rotoscoping features to generate a variety of different paint animation stylistic looks, starting with DV source video footage and automatically turning it into HD resolution painted animation for the final film release. Again, how you want to work is totally flexible.  If you are well versed in traditional hand drawn animation, you can work with Studio Artist movie layers to build up hand painted animation frame by frame, playing back the work in the Studio Artist canvas as you create it, using onion skins to build frame tweening or hand painted source rotoscope effects.  You can also use Studio Artist’s vector path capabilities to build a series of keyframe drawings that can be automatically interpolated to generate tween frames, avoiding hand painting each individual frame in an animation.  Or you can build a stylistic script (called a paint action sequence or PASeq for short), and automatically process a complete movie file using the PASeq with no additional hand work required.  If you need to touch up an automatically rotoscoped paint animation after the fact, you can always load it into a movie layer and hand paint on individual frames for any touch up, feature enhancement, special effects, etc. Studio Artist processing scripts, called Paint Action Sequences (PASeq for short), can be used to build an infinite range of potential visual effects.  they are unique in that you can combine individual action steps associated with digital painting, image processing, raster to vector conversion, texture synthesis, selection masking , warping, morphing, etc into a single intelligent processing script that can be automatically applied to a single image, a folder of images, or a movie file. Studio Artist is really an environment for creating an unlimited variety of visual effects. Owning a copy of Studio Artist is like buying hundreds of different plug-in or filter packages associated with other image or video processing applications that would cost thousands of dollars to individually purchase. Many of the unique effects available within Studio Artist are also not available anywhere else at any price. And the ability to mix and match different kinds of automatic painting techniques and image processing routines in a single processing script opens up all kinds of new synergistic effect capabilities that can be endlessly explored. I mentioned before that Studio Artist transcends traditional graphics application marketing categories. Traditional 2D painting or photo manipulation programs live in separate worlds (and associated separate software applications) from traditional animation or video processing programs. Raster graphics lives in separate programs from vector graphics.  Putting all of these different features into a single program enables many new kinds of synergistic approaches to creating art.  You can choose to ignore features you have no personal interest in if you wish, but having access to all of them in a single creative environment opens up many new and exciting ways of working and associated potential visual effects. Video processing effects can be used by 2D artists to create static imagery that encapsulates motion in a video sequence, or builds panorama or slit scan imagery.  Animators and video editors find that having an extremely full featured 2D paint program at their disposal to process moving imagery opens up an infinite variety of different potential stylistic effects. Stack filtering is an exciting new approach to building static art images from collections of individual images. Unique art processes can be created by using the animation scripting abilities to create procedural generative art processes that build up static imagery by repeated application of different processing effects working together to create a final visual result. Key-framing editable effect or paint parameters over time in a timeline associated with a paint action sequence processing script extends what can be achieved by this kind of automatic processing. Photomosaic imagery can be created by incorporating movie brushes into interactive or automatic paint tools. Commercial graphic artist Charis Tsevis has used Studio Artist to create an amazing collection of stunning photo mosaic imagery and to build a very successful commercial design career in the process. Working with procedural art is an approach i often take in my own work.  Studio Artist provides a wide range of different techniques that can be used to build abstract procedural or generative art. Working with iterative art processes that self generate abstract art imagery has been discussed above, and can take advantage of video processing features for generating static 2D imagery or abstract animations and movies. The paint synthesizer can also be configured to create abstract art automatically on its own, or under interactive user control. The end result could again be a single 2D painted image, or unique paint synthesizer features like time particles or dual-mode paint could be used to create dynamic abstract animations or live visual performance. Studio Artist also features a complete user configurable modular image processing architecture called MSG, which stands for modular synthesized graphics.  MSG presets can be used to create abstract procedural art imagery, generative animations, or to build custom image and video processing effects.  The Studio Artist Evolution Editor allows for interactive directed evolution of abstract imagery and processing effects, making it easy for users to create new images and effect by just selecting images they like and then mutating or evolving variations on the effect. MSG presets can also be embedded within paint synthesizer presets, allowing for extreme customization of the paint synthesizer drawing engine. Studio Artist Online Resources There are a wide range of different online resources you can use to learn more about Studio Artist. The Studio Artist User Forum at studioartist.ning.com is a full featured social forum for Studio Artist users.  You can post questions and have them answered by expert Studio Artist users. You can also examine different users artwork and video content in the photo and video galleries available on the forum.  A preset sharing group is available to download new preset effects, or to share your own. The Studio Artist Tips site is devoted to providing tutorial tip and feature information specific to Studio Artist 4. There are ‘getting started’ and ‘how to’ topic pages with links to specific information in addition to the complete set of blog posts detailing information on a wide variety of Studio Artist topics. The Studio Artist News Blog contains a series of short news articles on what Studio Artist users are up to, as well as additional tutorial and informational posts. There is a Studio Artist Video User Showcase on Vimeo that contains a wide range of different video processing and animation examples created in Studio Artist. A series of tutorial tips related to developing video processing strategies in Studio Artist is available here.  If you are interested in purchasing Studio Artist 4 you can find more information at Synthetik Software’s online store.

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