This software has real potential in a digital painting workflow. After doing some tests, I've come up with a few things I'd like to see in the upcoming versions:
- The lit side of the sphere has no gradation / falloff. This is really "a must have" to get realistic exposure effects and form description.
- Exposure slider.
- When exposing the lit side, the saturated color band over the terminator should show up in the swatches. Right now it does not correspond with any of the swatches, or the selected local color.
- Different lighting scenarios (overcast / ambient occlusion?).
- Fresnel effect (even matte surfaces have visible fresnel effects(not that important)).
- Material types (not really that important, because the lambertian material is THE most important for form description.
- Adjust material reflectance and roughness.
- Toggle reflections / highlight off/on.
- Export swatches to Photoshop format.
- Err.. Photoshop plugin.. That would be really schweet.
- Perhaps a set of non-photorealistic sliders so you can adjust the mix amount of local color and ambient light, direct light and local color. For stylistic reasons or artistic freedom...whatever
- The lit side of the sphere has no gradation / falloff. This is really "a must have" to get realistic exposure effects and form description.
The point of the program isn't to render spheres perfectly, though if you want that you'll be able to make a custom mask next version. Having the simple spheres most people find it much easier to use than with a more complex shape.
- Exposure slider.
I have a global exposure coming next version.
- Different lighting scenarios (overcast / ambient occlusion?).
Again custom masks will do it.
- When exposing the lit side, the saturated color band over the terminator should show up in the swatches. Right now it does not correspond with any of the swatches, or the selected local color.
It does actually do it, but because the values are quantized the super saturated band may be in-between the swatches if that makes sense. You probably shouldn't be trying to use overexposed colours though while painting. I would recommend underexposing everything while painting and letting the exposure adjustment layer do it in post, as it will be far more accurate than what you can paint.
- Fresnel effect (even matte surfaces have visible fresnel effects(not that important)).
- Material types (not really that important, because the lambertian material is THE most important for form description.
How would these help you paint?
- Toggle reflections / highlight off/on.
Good idea!
- Export swatches to Photoshop format.
Coming next version.
- Perhaps a set of non-photorealistic sliders so you can adjust the mix amount of local color and ambient light, direct light and local color. For stylistic reasons or artistic freedom...whatever
Maybe? I'll think about it, but very little good looking stylization is going to deviate from the standard colour math, while still being able to be constructed in a way.
I can't make the program construct a colour scheme like this for example
The shading curve is something people worked out retroactivley, and is something that in certain conditions automatically appears because of shading math.
Just purchased it, and can see this being super useful! Loving it so far.
Right off the bat, I noticed some functionality that I really wish was there. I wish there were an "always on top" function that I could toggle, to keep the window always on top as I open up pages of reference in my browser, or have Photoshop open, etc. Maybe a very minor thing, but I think it could be quite useful.
The point of the program isn't to render spheres perfectly, though if you want that you'll be able to make a custom mask next version. Having the simple spheres most people find it much easier to use than with a more complex shape.
I have a global exposure coming next version.
Again custom masks will do it.
It does actually do it, but because the values are quantized the super saturated band may be in-between the swatches if that makes sense. You probably shouldn't be trying to use overexposed colours though while painting. I would recommend underexposing everything while painting and letting the exposure adjustment layer do it in post, as it will be far more accurate than what you can paint.
How would these help you paint?
Good idea!
Coming next version.
Maybe? I'll think about it, but very little good looking stylization is going to deviate from the standard colour math, while still being able to be constructed in a way.
I can't make the program construct a colour scheme like this for example
The shading curve is something people worked out retroactivley, and is something that in certain conditions automatically appears because of shading math.
Fresnel effect: It would be for visual reference only.
Material types: Again, as visual reference. However, an option to blur or sharpen the highlight would probably be sufficient.
Hey mate. Next version is coming along. I had to improve my programming skill quite a bit so there has been a lot of research and practicing that sort of thing.
But i have a proper ACO swatch exporter written, custom masks are working, and it all is in a local install now instead of saving stuff to app data, oh and a proper visual colour picker. Before i release the next version though i still want to clean up the ui and make that all prettier .
I'm considering moving the object colour controls off onto a separate panel where you set an active object window then play with the material settings rather than having multiples.
A question came to mind:
As of now, there are 5 swatches. Would it be possible to add more swatches when you add custom masks? If that makes sense? Lets say I make a mask for the ambient occlusion part of the sphere, would it make sense that it got its own swatch?
That colour wheel is going to be really useful. The sliders can be a bit troublesome at times. I've been telling my friends about this app you've made and man you've definitely made some people really happy.
great new update, I already tried to make custom masks and so far,the only faced struggle is with the shadow creation, it doesn´t seem to behave like the masks from 1 and 2. as a feature request; could it be made possible that when the tab key is pressed, it jumps to the underlying input field? It would speed up the input procedure a bit.
Seems you already had a good shot at it, if you could post up an image of the masks i could help debug.
The names of the masks are all kinda silly, but it's just because of the method i use to search the file names, I'll probably make a more sensible alternative file naming convention next update, and probably remove the need to duplicate those masks, as that is a hassle.
If you want a better idea of what is happening. The number is because i just sort the files via alphabetical order, which defines the draw order, so it doesn't matter if there are duplicate or missing numbers.
Then you can choose either screen or alpha. Alpha is just like a normal png, and of course screen will multiply the pixels below it. The weird names then are how the program chooses what math to apply, and what colours to tint them. Try and make the masks use the full range from white to black, or the results wont be consistent across the different mask types. As you can see there is a lot of room to streamline this stuff, while leaving the rest backwards compatible, which i will get to the next update. And good idea about the tab thing. I'll put that on the list.
On Suzzane your spec has a white background, it should be nothing but the spec.
Also with light two make sure you turn off the first light.
That should sort out the issues .
EDIT:
Been optimising my code all day, managed to work out how to double the framerate, and take up almost no resources when not focused on. I'll have a lot more to do later that aren't as easy, but it's good news for the bug fix builds i'm working on.
Hey Muzz! Just want to say thanks for this great tool. I've already chipped and bought a copy and told all the artists in the office about this. We're a mostly 3D studio, but this tool uniquely benefits our workflow. Only wish I discovered this earlier, would have really helped in the early stages of coming up with palettes
I have a couple usability suggestions for your consideration. I would find it super useful if I could scroll around the work space in some way. I find myself sometimes running out of screen real-estate, especially when I am working on my lap top.
Another bit I thought of; when manually entering a number into any field, it took me a moment to realize that I had to press "enter" afterwards, as opposed to the value automatically being applied.
Lastly, I was caught off guard a couple times by testing something, and then realizing there was no undo
Just a couple thoughts there. Thanks again for the excellent software, I will continue using it on my upcoming projects for sure!
Hmm, good point on the enter thing! I should make it update everytime you press a button.
And yeah, actually scrolling and zooming around the space.... that is actually totally doable and not very hard to implement. hmmmmmm.
But i am really glad to hear that it has uses for you in production. I have some ideas on how to make it far more useful in that context, but i'll keep them underwraps for now.
Thanks Peter!
Btw, bugfix and highdef builds are almost ready to ship out.
Awesome Muzz, thanks for the consideration! I found a bug, not sure where to report it, so I'll leave it here It appears that when a hex code has a zero at the front, the zero is removed, thus changing the color (if I press enter or copy/paste to another object. See animated gif below for reference.
Great! That definitely helps! Do you have any thoughts about where you'd like to take this software? Feature wise. I have a few ideas, but I'd rather send you a message about that.
Yeah i have a few ideas, but really what i need to do is a complete overhaul of the software. The way i've done it is really going to limit me going on, and i've improved a lot at programming. I'm going to think about converting over to 3d rendering at some point, just because that gives me more flexibility to what i can do. Like it would be a lot easier to do the SSS thing, and skin colour generation if i am able to have depth maps.
One big ticket item i have for the future is to generate gamut masks, as an analysis and learning tool. Which i may or may not do before the overhaul, as i have a few ideas as to the best way of doing this.
Switching to 3D rendering, would you then use a realtime shader? Or raytracing? Would it be possible to do some kind of "fake bounce light" with a realtime shader? For more accurate shadow colour that is (bounce light from the ground plane). I know its possible with raytracing ofc
Just wanted to say this is a great tool. I haven't used it extensively as of yet, but I feel like I need to learn a lot more about the relationship between color and light in general, and this is an interesting little utility that helps save me some time when my brain is nothing but white noise.
I've started working on colour constuctor again full time. Rewriting
the whole thing from scratch in a new engine, Should hopefully mean less
bugs, better performance, 3d, and it will also let me rethink how
everything works, and implement a bunch of features i wanted to do from
the start but couldn't because of the limitations of the last engine.
Keep in mind this entire screenshot is only 2 days into the new version.
New stuff i will be doing! *3d previews with changable lights and materials. (SSS!? metals?) *scene management, have folders to be able to organize all your colours. *colour pick from images
Stuff i want to do: *colour gamut generator.
*Painting mode. I really want to implement a mode where you can paint
flat materials and then handpaint a light/shadow map. This is going to
take a lot of thought, but the idea seems like it could be very useful
in design iterations, and could almost even be worked into a painting
workflow that uses CC as your first colour pass, and export it to
useable layers. This will take a lot of work and wont arrive for quite a
while though.
As soon as i get the UI to a usable level i want to send out early alpha builds to people who have previously to get opinions.
Ok so the 3d plans are scrapped in preference of doing something way cooler. Not ready to share those plans yet. Can't have people jumping the gun on me with this one.
Is there a tutorial for making custom masks? Where to place the ImageMasks? ImageMasks is in the exe. Do I have to add it to the exe with compress software?
Hi Seto, I actually removed the custom mask functionality because of some changes i had to make to the mac build that meant my folder structure had to change.
If you send me an email to muzzoid@gmail.com i can send you an older build which still has it.
Hi Seto, I actually removed the custom mask functionality because of some changes i had to make to the mac build that meant my folder structure had to change.
If you send me an email to muzzoid@gmail.com i can send you an older build which still has it.
Replies
- The lit side of the sphere has no gradation / falloff. This is really "a must have" to get realistic exposure effects and form description.
- Exposure slider.
- When exposing the lit side, the saturated color band over the terminator should show up in the swatches. Right now it does not correspond with any of the swatches, or the selected local color.
- Different lighting scenarios (overcast / ambient occlusion?).
- Fresnel effect (even matte surfaces have visible fresnel effects(not that important)).
- Material types (not really that important, because the lambertian material is THE most important for form description.
- Adjust material reflectance and roughness.
- Toggle reflections / highlight off/on.
- Export swatches to Photoshop format.
- Err.. Photoshop plugin.. That would be really schweet.
- Perhaps a set of non-photorealistic sliders so you can adjust the mix amount of local color and ambient light, direct light and local color. For stylistic reasons or artistic freedom...whatever
Keep up the good work Muzz
The point of the program isn't to render spheres perfectly, though if you want that you'll be able to make a custom mask next version. Having the simple spheres most people find it much easier to use than with a more complex shape.
I have a global exposure coming next version.
Again custom masks will do it.
It does actually do it, but because the values are quantized the super saturated band may be in-between the swatches if that makes sense. You probably shouldn't be trying to use overexposed colours though while painting. I would recommend underexposing everything while painting and letting the exposure adjustment layer do it in post, as it will be far more accurate than what you can paint.
How would these help you paint?
Good idea!
Coming next version.
Maybe? I'll think about it, but very little good looking stylization is going to deviate from the standard colour math, while still being able to be constructed in a way.
I can't make the program construct a colour scheme like this for example
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T3r9NjMvvj4/SXf1maP-bNI/AAAAAAAAAXM/YKcyAuo_koA/s1600-h/hama_act.jpg
The shading curve is something people worked out retroactivley, and is something that in certain conditions automatically appears because of shading math.
Right off the bat, I noticed some functionality that I really wish was there. I wish there were an "always on top" function that I could toggle, to keep the window always on top as I open up pages of reference in my browser, or have Photoshop open, etc. Maybe a very minor thing, but I think it could be quite useful.
Fresnel effect: It would be for visual reference only.
Material types: Again, as visual reference. However, an option to blur or sharpen the highlight would probably be sufficient.
How is the next version coming along?
But i have a proper ACO swatch exporter written, custom masks are working, and it all is in a local install now instead of saving stuff to app data, oh and a proper visual colour picker. Before i release the next version though i still want to clean up the ui and make that all prettier
I'm considering moving the object colour controls off onto a separate panel where you set an active object window then play with the material settings rather than having multiples.
Looking forward to the next release. Keep up the good work mate!
As of now, there are 5 swatches. Would it be possible to add more swatches when you add custom masks? If that makes sense? Lets say I make a mask for the ambient occlusion part of the sphere, would it make sense that it got its own swatch?
When exporting swatches to a ACO file, will the light and ambient colour be exported aswell?
http://www.ctrlpaint.com/videos/color-constructor-pt1
Anyway, awesome little program. 10/10 keep working on it.
Btw here is a preview of the new version.
Hopefully after this release i'll be doing smaller more regular updates.
But for now. A theory quiz for you guys. Can anyone explain why when i change the light hue the blue only darkens, while the cyan changes crazily.
PS if you already know the answer, leave it up to other guys to have some fun and work it out.
https://gumroad.com/l/ColorConstructor
Already squashed one bug in the mac build. Stupid .DS_Store files messing up my clean folders! Grrrr
it doesn´t seem to behave like the masks from 1 and 2.
as a feature request; could it be made possible that when the tab key is pressed, it jumps to the underlying input field?
It would speed up the input procedure a bit.
Seems you already had a good shot at it, if you could post up an image of the masks i could help debug.
The names of the masks are all kinda silly, but it's just because of the method i use to search the file names, I'll probably make a more sensible alternative file naming convention next update, and probably remove the need to duplicate those masks, as that is a hassle.
If you want a better idea of what is happening. The number is because i just sort the files via alphabetical order, which defines the draw order, so it doesn't matter if there are duplicate or missing numbers.
Then you can choose either screen or alpha. Alpha is just like a normal png, and of course screen will multiply the pixels below it. The weird names then are how the program chooses what math to apply, and what colours to tint them. Try and make the masks use the full range from white to black, or the results wont be consistent across the different mask types.
As you can see there is a lot of room to streamline this stuff, while leaving the rest backwards compatible, which i will get to the next update.
And good idea about the tab thing. I'll put that on the list.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zgsdq65cbcd0vd0/AABzwofW_XRJBbahA5vvykXva?dl=0
I was able to fix the tube version so it shows the shadows, the background colour wasn´t filled yet on the
8_screen_bambien2 file.
Also with light two make sure you turn off the first light.
That should sort out the issues
EDIT:
Been optimising my code all day, managed to work out how to double the framerate, and take up almost no resources when not focused on. I'll have a lot more to do later that aren't as easy, but it's good news for the bug fix builds i'm working on.
I have a couple usability suggestions for your consideration. I would find it super useful if I could scroll around the work space in some way. I find myself sometimes running out of screen real-estate, especially when I am working on my lap top.
Another bit I thought of; when manually entering a number into any field, it took me a moment to realize that I had to press "enter" afterwards, as opposed to the value automatically being applied.
Lastly, I was caught off guard a couple times by testing something, and then realizing there was no undo
Just a couple thoughts there. Thanks again for the excellent software, I will continue using it on my upcoming projects for sure!
And yeah, actually scrolling and zooming around the space.... that is actually totally doable and not very hard to implement. hmmmmmm.
But i am really glad to hear that it has uses for you in production. I have some ideas on how to make it far more useful in that context, but i'll keep them underwraps for now.
Thanks Peter!
Btw, bugfix and highdef builds are almost ready to ship out.
I found a bug, not sure where to report it, so I'll leave it here
It appears that when a hex code has a zero at the front, the zero is removed, thus changing the color (if I press enter or copy/paste to another object. See animated gif below for reference.
Thanks a lot!
Almost finished with the zoom system.Just need to fix a few little things to work with zooming.
One big ticket item i have for the future is to generate gamut masks, as an analysis and learning tool. Which i may or may not do before the overhaul, as i have a few ideas as to the best way of doing this.
Gamut masks could be interesting
Thanks for your work on this Muzz.
This is a really time-saving sidecar app.
I'm really curious to see how you'll implement the gamut mask generator...
I've started working on colour constuctor again full time. Rewriting the whole thing from scratch in a new engine, Should hopefully mean less bugs, better performance, 3d, and it will also let me rethink how everything works, and implement a bunch of features i wanted to do from the start but couldn't because of the limitations of the last engine.
Keep in mind this entire screenshot is only 2 days into the new version.
New stuff i will be doing!
*3d previews with changable lights and materials. (SSS!? metals?)
*scene management, have folders to be able to organize all your colours.
*colour pick from images
Stuff i want to do:
*colour gamut generator.
*Painting mode. I really want to implement a mode where you can paint flat materials and then handpaint a light/shadow map. This is going to take a lot of thought, but the idea seems like it could be very useful in design iterations, and could almost even be worked into a painting workflow that uses CC as your first colour pass, and export it to useable layers. This will take a lot of work and wont arrive for quite a while though.
As soon as i get the UI to a usable level i want to send out early alpha builds to people who have previously to get opinions.
But i did just release a new build which you can read about here: http://colourconstructor.com/home/version-1-2
Also i have a 35% off sale until the 20th if you want to pick it up
If you send me an email to muzzoid@gmail.com i can send you an older build which still has it.