Facial Alignment Gallery Show Run

 

Transition Context manipulation of some gallery show output that was based on face images auto-aligned to a standard normalized position in the canvas.

Here's another one from an earlier gallery show run in the day using a different alignment routine.

More Style Experiments

 

Giving the Texture Synthesizer new life in Studio Artist V5.5.5.  Futurist loaded style image.

Face Normalize Data Augmentation

 

I'm working on a facial normalize data augmentation option for gallery show.  It auto-detects the main face in the source image, and then normalizes the position to a standard location.  I'm just doing the center points right now, but i'll add a scale option as well.

So why would you want to do this? Have you ever noticed how those StyleGAN faces are all in a standard normalized central position. Did you ever wonder why they did that?  Think it though carefully.

A few more simple examples of stacking the source faces below in successive gallery show cycles. Using our old friend the paint synthesizer Init QuickEdit.

You can see the effect of not doing the size scaling in that last one.  Which could be fun for artistic purposes. But of course you want that full normalization to a standard face position for other applications.

You have been able to do this kind of thing in a much more tedious way in Studio Artist forever.  Using the Inverse Warp Context action step.  But you had to manually draw the bezier curves for the inverse warp. Just doing it automatically this new way is way simpler.  Although it's going to fail for any source image that the frontal face detector craps out on.

I will also build another automatic one using the facial features.  It will have a very different visual aesthetic to it, since it will be based on a sparse warp.  I need to provide an option to use these in the high level Studio Artist interface as well. So we will add that to the ridiculously long 'to-do' list as well.

Finished Render from Evolution Series

 

Didn't quite get it where i wanted it to end up. Ideally i'd like more of an edge definition separation between the 3 spinning people and the background.  I could start another render cycle with some tweaks, add some pos-neg space modulation, but i'm going to start on the Image Compeller Ip Op effect to dial it in that way instead.

The paint strokes in this are all time particles, so you can see they have persistence and movement over multiple frames.  I've started on some time particle QuickEdits in Studio Artist V5.5.5.

Of course as soon as i typed out the above i realized that i could configure a mini-compeller directly inside of the paint synthesizer to optimize the top paint animation i wasn't quite happy with. So i did. And you can see the results here in this second paint animation.

Evolution

 

Build Up the Paint Experiements

 

Built up the static painting from a 30 frame PASeq animation. The very simple paint was keyframed over the 30 frame animation (180 degree rotation of the polar path angle).

Used the facial feature detection bezier path generator along with some Threshold IpOp effect skeleton to build a dark think scaffolding core.  Used the Mondo Simplify IpOp effect to build a colored shell around the core armature. Used some clever multi- octave adaptive expansion (low Mix) to add some mid frequency structure to the colored shell.  Cooked in some multi-octave gradient lighting and adaptive expansion to raise the shell to a density that better fills the color space of the digital pixel frame.

Used the Color Edge IpOp effect to lay down some hard colored edges (no anti-aliasing) on a solid white background.  then used the Geodesic Falloff IpOp effect to infill the white background from the hard colored edge core structure.

Thought it would be fun to add some style modulation to that last one. I changed the Geodesic Fill a little, added style color palette modulation, and used the Style to modulate a Displacement IpOp effect of the sparse color armature prior to filling in the overall structure from it.  Used a small jpeg of some futurist period artwork for the Loaded Style image.

Dispersion Experiments

 

Trying different variations of real thin paint lines that have path starts tied to high texture areas of a source video followed by intricate adjustments of the dispersion process that generates the 'flow' effect in the video. I'm using Flow modulation to SideChain modulate a blur effect to help sculpt the dispersion, which is primarily created by a self modulating warp effect.