Relationships Between the Texture Synthesizer and MSG Processing

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In yesterday’s post, we discussed how to use the Texture Synthesizer and keyframe interpolation in the PASeq timeline to create a simple self-animating color gradient mapped texture field animation. We also mentioned that you could build the same effect using MSG as opposed to the Texture Synthesizer (as shown above). We will show how to do this in today’s post, as well as discuss the relationship between the texture synthesizer and certain MSG processors.

The paint action sequence (PASeq) below was used in yesterday’s post to generate the color gradient mapped procedural texture field animation. You can refer to yesterday’s post for more information on how we configured the Texture Synthesizer controls to generate the texture field color gradient mapping effect.

The rest of the gallery images above shows how I configured an effect identical to yesterday’s Texture Synthesizer effect using MSG processors in the MSG Advanced Editor. Note that the PASeq first erases the canvas to white, and then runs two identical Texture Synthesizer action steps. The Texture Synthesizer was setup to modulate the texture field Depth based on the canvas luminance. So the third action step is generating a texture field based on recursive modulation from the original texture field generated by the second action step.

If you look at the processor chain editor (left side) of the MSG Advanced Editor shown in the 2nd gallery image above, you can see that it mirrors the construction of the PASeq effect from yesterday. The SetToValue processor is first used to set the R Out image stream to white (2nd gallery image). The, the R Out image stream is processed by 2 successive AdvTurb processors (3rd and 4th gallery images). The final 1to3GradMap processor color maps the R Out image stream with the first Color Gradient (as shown in the last gallery image above) to generate the final gradient color mapped output effect (5th gallery image).

Each AdvTurb processor acts like the texture field generation part of the Texture Synthesizer. You can see in the next to last gallery image above that the editable parameters associated with the AdvTurb processor mirror the controls available in the Spatial, Generation, and Mapping control panels of the Texture Synthesizer.

There are a number of different MSG processors you can use to generate turbulence noise fields that emulate the kind of textures you can generate with the Texture Synthesizer. The AdvTurb, AdvTurbColor, and AdvTurbColor1 processors emulate the Texture Synthesizer when it’s being modulated by an input image. The GenAdvTurb and GenAdvTurbGradMap processors emulate the Texture Synthesizer when it’s not receiving any input modulation (so all of it’s different Mod Src parameters would be set to none). The GenTurb processor doesn’t have an input port like the AdvTurb processor does, it only outputs an image stream.

The processors mentioned above that have Color in their names generate full color output as opposed to single image channel output. The Color Processing parameter in the Texture Synthesizer’s Effect control panel let’s you distinguish between similar texture field generation options.

So, you can think of the Texture Synthesizer as being like a simple MSG preset, composed of a fractal turbulence texture generating processor along with some additional processors to emulate the different Effect Type and Color Space options available in the Texture Synthesizer. Historically, the Texture Synthesizer was added to Studio Artist early on in it’s development, while the MSG architecture was added at a later date.

The advantage of using the Texture Synthesizer is that it’s an easy way to generate a wide variety of different pre-configured texture based effects quickly. The advantage of using MSG is that you can create an unlimited number of different texture based effects due to the modular nature of the MSG architecture. You also have the availability of using the Evolution Editor with MSG presets to perform directed evolution, so it’s easy to use things like mutation or swap evolution to create all kinds of new and different effects easily.

Category: MSG

Tags: gradient texture synthesizer

Relationships Between the Texture Synthesizer and MSG Processing

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