Big City

Trying to build something like an interactive slitscan squeegee brush. Using brush load functionality with Bus1 source from another layer. Also using an alternate tracking option in Paint Source Offset. So the brush is built from scanning in layer 2, coloring comes from the source, and it is drawing into layer1.

San Francisco

Running some experiments with generating slit scan effects from a static single image. The trick is to turn the image into a movie. So i used keyframed warps to do that. I then loaded the warp movie, and then ran temporal slit scan effects on it.

3 Roads to Travel

Decisions, decisions. Gallery show is making them. Via adaptive source masking and self-mutating MSG presets.

Peer Inside

Working on a new multi-resolution lighting gradient effect. Great way to do in one processing step what took an entire PASeq before, so it's actually pretty useful. Also has built in noise reduction (along with some other new tweaks), which opens up a whole new world for gradient lighting effects.

Smear BlockHead Afternoon

Working on cleaning up a ton of things since 4:30 am today. Organizing a new preset collection, i stumbled upon some different kinds of smear presets. Smear Block is a particular brush load algorithm option with a very distinctive look to it. It looks like i feel this afternoon.

Of course once you stumble upon a new set of presets you keep experimenting with tweaking new things out of it.

Like this new dual paint combination preset made of vector paint with additional built in raster water wash. Hence it's dual vector-raster nature.

Looking Inward

Playing around with mutating MSG presets in gallery show.

Cool Cat

This gallery show stream output image i selected from a recent nightly gallery show run was automatically generated from a randomized folder of jazz poster imagery. Using additional mutating adaptive source masking. Now let's all visualize San Francisco's Fillmore district together.

Block Heads

So i started with a folder of men's facial images in a folder. I then used Studio Artist to inverse warp them all to a standard head shape. I then loaded the inverse warp3d standardized head movie as a source movie in Studio Artist. I then used the Temporal Displace effect to time displace into the standardized head source movie. The blocks were randomly generated using the Random Block Exchange ip op effect, with the Grid Fill with Random Source Palette option for the Exchange parameter.

You can also use GalleryShow to do it, and then you don't need to load a source movie file. I've added some new features recently to make stack filtering super easy to do in Gallery Show.

Joe

Gallery Show managed to create a painting that looks like a friend of mine. Using current search GS technique along with a dynamic regionization paint synth modifier, and an auto-mutating start cycle of canvas warp and transformational effects.

Fractal Overlord

Taking a break from my run of gallery show posts for a day. I finally got around to adding support for variable color palette sizes, which is so useful. We always thad the fixed 48 color size only palette limitation before. But not anymore. Hurray.

The large size color palettes are really useful for color palette mapping of continuous tone images. But not always so useful for MSG. Especially if you are mapping a black and white image to a color one using a 1To3_PaletteMap processor. Having small palette sizes is really useful there. And now you can do it.

I guess i should point out that when building MSG presets you always had the option of using the 1To3_PaletteMap1 MSG processor, which does let you choose the # of colors you want to use from the larger fixed size color palette. But if you are using directed evolution, you could easily end up with presets based on the 1To3_PaletteMap processor and the large fixed color palettes. The new features let you specify an arbitrary sized color palette. So then, no matter what happens when working with directed evolution, you are working with a size limited color palette.

Peoples March

More from my recent autonomous gallery show experiments with self-mutating temporal ip op effects used to stack filter a folder of news images from the recent climate change march in NYC. Random images from the GS source folder are loaded into each frame in the mutated temporal ip ops. And another random source image is loaded to generate an adaptive selection mask for the application of the gallery show cycle stack filter effect. So they tend to stack up on top of each other over time as the gallery show cycles progress. And you get a very different look to that then normal non-masked stack filtering.

Danger Zone

Trying some new experiments with self masking temporal ip op effects using gallery show. So auto-mutating mutating the current Temporal effect. With random images loaded into each frame used in the mutated Temporal effect so that you can very easily do stack filtering. And also using a randomly loaded source image from the same folder of images that is then used to build random adaptive mask. You can also build your masks off of the previous gallery show cycle output, which is a whole different look. Like always with self-mutating gallery show autonomous output via an image stream, you pick through what it made automatically afterwards looking for keepers.

Frack Off

Grabbed this from a gallery show stream that is using a source folder of news images from the recent NYC climate change march as input into mutating Temporal Ip Op effects. So each gallery show cycle randomly loads a complete set of images to be used as faked frame inputs for the temporal processing. So you can stack filter directly off of a folder of images without putting them in a movie file if you do it this way.

Stop

This clown wants Hurricane Ana to stop coming to Hawaii. And she seems to be listening. If you look closely, you can see this image is using region skeleton paths generated from path start regionalization. Courtesy of gallery show of course. As we continue the nightly testing. While i watch Gotham and gallery show does all the work for me. Streaming out a succession of mutated artwork. I've been playing with the new search technique GS option. Along with various constrained mutation settings, and an additional mutated favorites folder for the start cycle processing.

Clowning Around

Send in the clowns — please! Circus folk fear a national clown shortage is on the way. Too many people are apparently reading the news these days.

Clowns are becoming hard to find. You have to really look. Focus on the image. Focus on the details.

But gallery show is here to help. Searching for paint presets and then mutating them, bending them to its will. Clowning around in it's own way. And by golly it found a good one. In it's self-autonomous way. Using it's new dynamic brush constrained mutation features. In combination with some additional self-mutating water wash start cycle processing from a favorites folder. So while i may be lazy for using that water wash paint preset folder way too much, gallery show is helping me out by auto-mutating it on the fly each new GS cycle. 

Note to self. Maybe i should add preset search tag options to the start and end cycle options.

Heart of Darkness

Spending too much time staring at hurricane projection maps leads you to dark thoughts. Hopefully we will be spared the bullet again this time. Watch and wait. I knocked this off quickly while working on tweaking the new dynamic brush features. It's all paint synthesizer, kind of a study in dark abstraction.

The Process of DeEvolution

Or is it transmutation. 

Or transformation. 

Or just a process of degradation.

Someone Tweeted

Added some new features to make this kind of thing ridiculously easy to generate. Like it literally could not be any easier to do now. But you can still go in under the hood of the paint synthesizer to tweak away to your hearts content if you want to. But if you don't want to get under the hood at all, you can just do it extremely easily.

Time for a Change

Let's break from recent tradition and post something that was not directly automatically generated using gallery show. Poor GS is tired from working so hard. And one of it's super cool features, the one that auto mutates paint presets to be the new dynamic brush regionizers, just didn't seem to be quite right. So poor GS needed to take some time off for surgery. And the operation was successful.

The issue with uniform random parameter mutation is that it assumes that the entire N-dimensional parameter space is equally interesting. Which is obviously not the case at all for something like the Paint Synthesizer. So you need to build intelligent heuristics into the mutation process for optimal results. And those actually had been put in there for the new dynamic brush regionize features, but there was a tiny code bug that was messing up one key part of it. Which explains why i was so mystified when i watched GS churn out these specific directed mutations prior to opening GS up for surgery. But i also expanded the heuristics while in there to give better fine-tuned results as well. So it's performing a lot more like i would expect it to now.

You can also use macro edit commands to speed up the editing process by not to think about all this coordinated parameter stuff while manually editing. Which is quite useful even for guys like me when it comes to setting up real specific kinds of paint presets that require a lot of coordinated parameter editing to be configured properly. We're trying to add more of that kind of thing. Because i like it quite a bit to be honest, and i think you will even more. And i'm always open to suggestions for more macro edit commands to add. So please feel free to pass them on to me. Another grossly under-utilized section of Studio Artist. Check it out.

Eye of the Beholder

Still trying to see the violin, as oppose to the machine gun. If you've been following the thought thread in the subsequent posts.

So this was generated automatically by gallery show, using a mutated favorites technique. The Favorites folder was filled with a sampling of different 'tube' paint presets. I also had the GS paint 'Draw Option' set to 'Rnd Dynamic Regionize', so then it takes any of the mutated paint presets it creates on the fly and further edits them by forcing them to be random path start regionization presets that also use the new Dynamic Brush option. Which is cool because you can do things that seem fairly intelligent in a single paint preset that would have required a lot of steps in a PASeq to do in the past. So it's a double mutation, the second mutate pass also narrowing it down to a specific kind of paint effect look (regionized dynamic brush).

Rocking in the Free World

Thought i'd toss in something lighter after all of the recent heavy posts. I guess i picked violin if you read yesterday's post. Experimenting with a new gallery show feature that lets you build a self mutating GS technique off of the current search results in the preset browser. My search was for woodcut presets, although you'd never know that looking at this image after the mutation part of the process.

Perspective

Violin or machine gun? I guess it all depends on your perspective. Your mood at that particular moment in time, in space, in life. More gallery show experimentation using self generating paint strategies. Which you could think of as auto-generating PASeqs, except they happen on the fly auto-editing a randomly selected paint preset during a single gallery show cycle.

It just occurred to me that i could make the paint strategies self-mutating as well. So now i have a goal for tomorrow morning. To shape my perspective. To bend my mood. To keep developing gallery show into an auto-creative machine beast. The madness continues.

Terror Awaits You

Terror awaits you. Or so says Gallery Show. Self-mutating and recycling presets and random source images until it's totally confused. Terrified even. Because it looking at random news imagery. And using temporal image operations to create self mutating stack filtering effects with randomized source masking. Maybe it needs to spend more time watching Sesame Street, or Cosmos. Looking at funny images, or images of wonder and amazement. Like that nobel prize today for beating the diffraction limit for imaging molecules. Now that's amazing, and something we were once told was impossible, but today we can do it. Fun stuff, and totally magical, not terrifying at all. Now that's some exciting news.

The Immortal

The immortal seem to always be around. Causing trouble. I wonder why. Another gallery show screen capture during the middle of an automated testing run. Using the new auto-masking options. Self-randomizing vectorizer technique i believe in this one.

Ferguson Missouri

Aim for the head. And then shoot them another 7 times. Just to be sure. Because they might be zombies. Serve and protect, i believe that's the motto. But who is getting protected anyway? Food for thought.

Image was generated using gallery show with a randomizing ip op technique that only generates vector ip op output. With some of the new auto masking running in surprise me mode processing the randomly selected source image. Start cycle processing is a auto mutated paint preset category. Output image is a random grab from the middle of the gallery show image stream. Gallery show is over drawing on top of the previous cycle output, so i guess it's doing dynamic painting. Source image folder is full or campy irony, the kind i like the best.

Rough Seas Ahead

Steer the boat carefully, cause there's rough seas ahead.

Terror awaits, all because of THEM.

But our boys are on it, using covert action to monitor THEM.

Everybody's Terrified of THEM

Everybody's terrified all the time.

We're scared of THEM.

We better bomb THEM quick.

Before it's too late.

It's a Jungle Out There

It's a jungle out there some days. Dog eat dog, man eat man (well i hope not that). Microbe eat man, which can be a force of good as well as evil inside of us all as we learn so much more about our internal bacterial friends that live inside of us. And maybe there's something to reflect on there, that what appears on the surface to be our enemies might actually be our friends, helping us not just to digest our food, but to fight off infections from other not so friendly bacteria, to modify our mood, or weight. We're finding out all kinds of things about all of the stuff living inside of us. Maybe that stuff is as much a part of us as the cells in our body.

Gallery show wasn't really thinking about any of that. He (she,it) was busy auto-mutating random paint presets, actually turning them into mini generative paint action sequences on the fly using some new features we added to it recently. So this is another gallery show stream grab from these recent experiments, where you point it at a folder of really boring tube paint presets, and it creates finished portraits by auto-editing a boring paint preset on the fly, in essence building an automatic PASeq (so that you don't have to). And there's a lot more to do to improve these new features, but i think they are pretty cool, and point in some interesting new directions as we head into the Studio Artist future.

This guy looks like he has just come out of the Thunder Dome (2 walk in, 1 comes out). Although he did start out as a happy clown image. So my philosophical ramblings above came out of that fleeting thought as i grabbed this image for my daily post. Tomorrow we're headed into new fun areas, as we use Gallery Show to semi-autonomously explore alien invasions. Which also seems to relate to my many recent obsessions on bacteria here. Gallery show (and me apparently) are reading way too many news articles about various bacteria (both good and evil) recently.

Everyone Loves a Clown

Everyone loved a clown.

Because they always have a smile on their face.

Making the children laugh.

With their joyous expressions and attitude.

The Ministry of Health

The Ministry of Health sent you home with an aspirin.

But there's talk of conspiracy and mayhem about.

And remember to wash your hands nice and clean.

Before you get to your business and burn all the bodies.

Dark Passage

A dark walk though dark times. More Gallery Show experimentation, which seems to be my modus operandi these days. If you watch it closely while it automatically does it's thing, you keep learning more about how to improve it. Plus, you can eat dinner at the same time. Which is quite hard to do with a physical paint brush.

It's interesting, because if i watched a normal human artist to learn from them, it could take days, weeks, years to watch them finish pieces. It could take me forever to learn anything working that way, by watching a real person work. But Gallery Show churns out several hundred finished pieces in a few hours. Are they all master pieces, no, of course not. But i can learn quite a bit really quickly by watching a semi-intelligent machine work.

And i sure do learn a lot in a short period of time working this way. And i learn from the mistakes as much or more than from the successful pieces it creates. So here we see a small example of what the singularity will be like in action, when it swings into full force. And why it will be an inflection point in human history. Because things will get a whole lot faster and more sophisticated really quickly.

I'm working with auto-masking and masking in general in a very interesting new way with these new experiments. Which you yourself will be able to play with once you get your hands on a copy of V5.