Recursive Modulation in the Texture Synthesizer

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Recursive Modulation in the Texture…

The Texture Synthesizer is an older Studio Artist operation mode that can be used to generate procedural texture fields and texture based effects. While it is superseded to some extent by MSG these days, there are still lots of interesting visual effects you can generate with it. The Texture Synthesizer is designed so that the local properties of the generated texture field can be modulated by the current canvas or source or other layer images. So by using it multiple times to recursively process it’s previous output you can build additional organic complexity into the resulting generated texture.

Let’s take a look at a very basic texture synthesizer preset. The control panel settings below are based on a slight modification of the Default : General : A Default texture synthesizer preset. I slightly reduced the Directionality parameter in the Spatial control panel to make the generated texture field slightly less directional (to better see the recursive modulation effects we are discussing in this post).

Two key parameters to look at in the Spatial control panel above are the Depth Mod and the Depth Mod Src. Note that the Depth Mod is set to 200%, and the Depth Mod Src is set to the Canvas. What this means is that the local canvas gray values locally modulate the depth of the generated procedural texture field.

You can think of the generated procedural texture field as being 3-dimentional in nature. The effect output is based on sampling a single 2-dimensional plane located in the 3-dimensional procedural texture space at some depth. You can use the Horizontal and Vertical Offset parameters to move the texture field horizontally and vertically. The Depth Mod parameter lets you modulate the local z depth position for the generated output texture (think of the third texture field dimension as moving in or out of the canvas). So we can modulate Depth within the 3-dimensional procedural texture field by locally modulating it as we generate different spatial output locations in the canvas. Being clever about how you modulate the Depth of the generated texture field allows for all kinds of interesting visual effects.

For this particular example, we will be using the output of the previous texture field generation pass to modulate the depth of the next texture field generated. The 4th gallery image above shows a PASeq of the recursive processing i’m talking about. We will start off by erasing the canvas to white. Then we will run this simple texture synthesizer preset 3 times. The first time we will see a non depth modulated texture field, since the initial canvas used to modulate the depth is set to white (so there’s no local grayscale modulation of the texture field depth).

The next 2 texture synthesizer action steps will self modulate their generated texture field’s depth locally based on the previous canvas texture image. The 4th, 5th, and 6th gallery images above show off the 3 texture field outputs for the 3 texture synthesizer action steps we used for our recursive modulation processing. Note how the 4th and 5th gallery images show off the effects of self-modulating the Depth based on the previous texture field output (the generated texture gets visually richer and more organic looking).

The Generator control panel determines the particular kind of procedural turbulence noise field that will be generated by the texture synthesizer. Procedural means that the texture field is generated mathematically (as opposed to being based on a tiled texture image). Procedural textures have a more organic visual appearance to them since they are always varying, while the eye is very sensitive to tiled image textures and perceived them as being artificial. We’re using a simple Cloud Algorithm, with a Depth of 441%, so there’s 4 spatial octaves of texture being internally generated. The texture synthesizer generates fractal turbulence texture fields, so the energy of higher frequency internal texture octaves reduces to simulate 1/F fractal noise.

The Effect control panel determines the kind of texture-based effect generated by the texture synthesizer. So depending on how you set the different editable parameters in that control panel you can generate a wide range of different texture field based effects. The Effect control panel settings we used in the 3rd gallery image above for our simple black and white example just replaces the luminance channel of the color source (which is set to come from the Canvas, and we started out by erasing it to white).

The color image at the top of the page was generated inexactly the same way as the black and white image gallery example shown directly above. The only difference is that I erased the canvas to the source image as opposed to white, and then ran the 3 same texture synthesizer action steps (which just run the texture synthesizer preset we detailed above for 3 times to recursively process the canvas image). Remember, the Effect control panel is setup to use the canvas coloring for the effect, and replaces the canvas luminance channel with the generated texture field. And the generated texture field is locally depth modulated by the original canvas luminance channel.

Category: Image Ops EFX

Tags: texture texture synthesizer

Recursive Modulation in the Texture Synthesizer

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