Fine Tuning Sketch Paint Presets

You are here:

Home
Painting and Paint Synthesizer
Fine Tuning Sketch Paint Presets

The Studio Artist paint synthesizer is capable of some really nice smart sketch paint effects. However, sometimes you need to fine tune the editable parameters associated with the intelligent sketch behavior to get the best rendition of your particular source image. Today’s post will take a look at how to fine tune a sketch effect.

The particular Cartoon1 paint preset we are working with today is Cartoon1.paint

The Cartoon1 paint preset has some constrained Path Start control panel settings. The Texture Range control is turned on (as shown below). The original Cartoon1 paint preset with the source image we’re using in today’s post generates the sketch effect seen in the 2nd gallery image above

To generate more source detail in the sketch, you can reduce the Texture Min setting associated with the Texture Range in the Path Start control panel. I tried reducing the Texture Min from the original 95 setting to 10 (3rd gallery image above), and generated the sketch shown in the 4th gallery image above. Note that there’s a lot more source image edge detail in this second sketch.

In addition to the Path Start control panel constraints discussed above, there’s also some additional Path End control panel constraints on the automatic paths generated by the paint synthesizer. In the Path End control panel you can set the Visual Error parameter to Blanking as Black PaintLumErr.
By changing this Visual Error parameter setting, you can change the intelligent path dropout generated by the Path End processing in the paint synthesizer during automatic painting. For my particular source image used in this post, I got better results switching the Path End control panel Visual Error to the Thin PaintColor LumErr setting. The sketch image shown at the very top of the post was generated with this Visual Error and the Path Start control panel Texture Min setting of 10 discussed above.

What to Check to Adjust Intelligent Sketch Effects

By adjusting the paint synthesizer control panel settings associated with automatic painting, you can dramatically influence the appearance of Studio Artist automatic painting.

The settings in the Path Start control panel determine where automatic paint strokes will start drawing. The Path Shape and Path Angle control panel settings determine how the automatic paint strokes are generated. The Path End control panel settings determine how automatically generated paint strokes prematurely end path drawing. The Path Application control panel settings determine the spacing of individual paint nibs on the automatically generated paint paths (and also control paint nib dropout along the paint path).

Intelligent paint effects like the sketch effect detailed in this post typically have some sort of paint synthesizer editable parameter defined drawing constraints in the Path Start, Path End, or Path Application control panels. So those are the places to look first if you want to fine tune the constrained intelligent automatic drawing behavior.

Where ever you see a control based on Texture, it’s referring to source image edge texture. Higher texture values refer to more extreme edges in the source image. A low or 0 texture value would refer to flat or smoothly shaded areas of the image. Texture based parameter settings are oftentimes sensitive to the individual characteristics of a particular source image, as seen in today’s post example.

Source Texture can also be used as a parameter modulator throughout the paint synthesizer. An example would be modulating the size of the source brush based on the Texture or Inverse Texture (larger brush sizes at source image edges vs smaller brush sizes at source image edges).

Visual Error parameters intelligently analyze both the source image and the existing painted canvas at a given spatial drawing location and intelligently decide if adding additional paint there leads to a better or worse painted rendition of the source image. If the particular visual error algorithm decides adding additional paint to an area of the canvas will lead to a worse source image rendition there, then it doesn’t apply the current paint nib to the canvas, or it stops the paint path from drawing there.

There are visual error control options available in the Path End control panel, and in the Path Application control panel (under the Probability parameter settings).

Categories: Painting and Paint Synthesizer, Sketch EFX

Tags: paint synthesizer sketch

Fine Tuning Sketch Paint Presets

Related posts