Posts: 27
Joined: Fri Oct 13, 2017 4:11 pm
Putting the BRUSHES into the Spotlight
I am currently trying to get familiar with the brushes. I have something of an idea what those brushes can do that were explicitly mentioned and introduced in Taron's tutorials, but I am completely at a loss with the others.
And when I tried to get to know them a bit, some brushes completely baffled me by themselves and pretty much all when it comes to their reaction to the "Blending-Parameter." (More about this below.)
So I made a little experiment with varying bristle sizes and counts to get the beginning of a feeling what does parameters do for each brush and also how different brushes with the same settings might compare to each other. But of course, here lies another problem: Because I don't know about the strengths of most of the brushes, my first experiment might have gone in completely the wrong direction. Or the direction might have been not the bad, but I should have changed parameters that I didn't change... Or used stipples instead of strokes. <- You get the idea...
For my little experiment, I tried out all the brushes with Build-Up 50%, Bristle Size and Bristle Count each one taking one the values 0, 12, 37, 62, 88 and 100. (Except for Brush #1.) I did this both for Blending = 0% and Blending = 1%. I chose full opacity and bias = 0. Size was always about 170 and Min. Size about 75% (though for some brushes this might have slipped to 0).
Interestingly, Switching from 0% to 1% for Blending makes a huge difference for the appearence of each brush. But it doesn't make any difference at all whether I set Blending to 1% or 100%. This was one thing that amazed me very much about Blending. The other thing was that, as soon as it is set to 1%, it strongly flattens the material. But I thought Blending would be about "changing" the color while "changing the shape" of the material would be smudging?
Afterwards, I did think that it might have been not the best idea to choose full opacity because, with strokes this would be bound to make me lose a lot of detail concerning the "inner structure" of each stroke. But I did another short test and after a certain degree of build up different values of opacity don't make any difference anymore.
On the other hand, a build up value of 50% might have destroyed the differences between the different brush strokes. But it's hard to guess for which parameter settings the appearence suddenly fundamentally changes. (I tried that out for Brush #5, too)
So I thought I'd sum up everything I know (or think to know so far) in this post and afterwards every brush gets his own post where I attach the "experiment"-pictures and pose my specific questions.
Brush #1:
For this brush, there is no controllable bristle size or bristle count. It's best for blending smoothly and is, in one of the tutorials, referred to one of the "best" brushes for warping (together with brush 6). I did not yet try out different bias-settings for this brush.
Brush #2:
Brush with adjustable bristle count and bristle size. I did not yet try out different bias-settings for this brush.
Brush #3:
Brush with adjustable bristle count and bristle size. It has a continuous bristle randomness. The appearance of this brush is strongly dependent on the speed with wich I move the pen of the tablet: the slower the movement, the more point-like and closer to each other the bristle marks are. The faster, the more elongated they become and the further apart they are set.
Different bias-values give you different "moon-shapes".
Brush #4:
Brush #5:
Brush #6:
Brush #7:
Brush #8:
Fractal Turbulence Brush. <- The one that is really great for treebark.
For this brush, bristle size and count have an adapted meaning. But Taron made that clear in the manual.
Brush #9:
This is the brush that is able to see the canvas texture already during the painting/drawing process. It randomizes bristles per stroke and instead of the parameter "bristle count" it's got the parameter "bristle hue" that makes for really nice color effects.
When used for dapples, this brush gives that cool "fireworks" effect. (If Minimum Size is distincly smaller than "Size". #9 is the Brush where the value of the Min.size-Parameter has the strongest effect on the appearance. but the importence of this parameter can really only been seen when the brush is used for dappling - when used for strokes, it doesn't make such a difference. <- Which always makes me wonder which important parameter I might completely be ignoring for each of all those brushes because I simply have no idea how to bring out their meaning.)
Brush #9 furthermore has two additional parameters: "Oscillate" (which makes for great smudging/blending (?) effects) and "Oscillate chaos". <- And about "Oscillate chaos" I have another question, Taron: When you introduced them in one of your tutorials you demonstrated that high values for mouse speed (or low values?) would even out the squiggliness. But I tried different Mouse-speed-values (while using a pen) and it didn't make any difference at all?
Brush #10:
Image Brush. I didn't try that one out yet...