< Previous | Contents | Manuals Home | Boris FX | Next >
SynthEyes offers a painting system that allows you to directly paint in the alpha channel of extracted textures. You can paint fine detail into textures, especially cards, rather than trying to create extremely detailed geometry. And you can better capture natural elements.
Painting can be completely controlled only from the Paint toolbar, accessed from the perspective view's right-click menu. There must be exactly one mesh selected; it should not be the edit mesh. There are convenience buttons to show only the alpha channel, hide the selection, and hide the mesh completely on the toolbar.
There are four mouse modes for painting, all of which use the same three Size, Sharpness, and Density settings. These settings are adjusted by dragging vertically, starting within the respective Density etc box on the Paint toolbar.
Fine Point! : The settings affect the last stroke drawn (so you can change it), as well as the next stroke you draw. To change the parameters before starting a new stroke, without affecting the old stroke , either click one of the drawing mode buttons again, or right-click one of the setting buttons. While the setting buttons are attached to an existing stroke, there is an asterisk (*) after the name of the button. You can re-attach to the last stroke by double-clicking one of the settings buttons.
The Size setting controls the size of the brush, in pixels. The sharpness setting controls the type of fall-off away from the center of the brush. The Density setting ranges from -1 to +1: at -1, painting makes the pixels immediately transparent, at +1, painting makes the pixels immediately opaque. In between, pixels are made only somewhat more transparent or opaque. The transparent and opaque buttons on the toolbar set the density quickly to the respective value.
The Paint Alpha mode is for 'scribbling' on a mesh while holding down the (left) mouse button, turning the texture extracted at those pixels transparent or opaque etc as controlled by the settings. You can paint away extra pieces of geometry, where the texture is the blurry background, adjust and soften edges to match the desired portion of the texture, etc.
Note: you must paint on the mesh, you really are painting on the geometry. If you click off the edge of the mesh, thinking the size of the pen is going to affect the mesh, it will not, nothing will happen at all.
The Paint Alpha loop is a scribble-type mode, but it creates filled regions, to rapidly fill a slightly noisy interior in an automatically-created alpha channel, or to knock a hole around some unwanted texture.
The Pen Z Alpha mode produces straight-line segments between endpoints, with one endpoint created for each click of the mouse. The "Z" in "Pen Z" refers to the shape of the paths created, not any particular meaning. Use Pen Z mode to create clean straight lines along edges, to mask the edge of a building, for example.
The Pen S Alpha mode produces curved spline-based curves between endpoints, with an endpoint created per mouse click. Again, the "S" refers to the shape produced, though you can think of it as spline or smooth as well. Use Pen S mode to create smoother curved edges.
In addition to Undo, the paint toolbar contains buttons to delete the last stroke (and then the one before that, and before that, ) and to delete all the strokes.
After finishing painting, click the Save button on the texture panel to re-write the altered texture(s) to disk.
Your paint strokes are recorded, so that if you later re-calculate the texture, the paint strokes will be re-applied to the new version of the texture. If you have changed to the mesh or solve substantially, you may need to re-paint or touch up the alpha to adjust.
©2024 Boris FX, Inc. — UNOFFICIAL — Converted from original PDF.