Any Documentation for Procedural Textures?

[R C-R]

The new Procedural Textures filters looks very useful, but I can't find any documentation for how to use this feature. Some of it is self-explanatory but in particular there seem to be a lot of new complex expressions in the equations presets that are not yet documented anywhere that I can find.

[Polygonius]

I agree, especially for equations/ terms a doc is a must have. But there is another discussion of it 

 

[Seneca]

In computer graphics, a procedural texture is a texture created using a mathematical description (i.e. an algorithm) rather than directly stored data. The advantage of this approach is low storage cost, unlimited texture resolution and easy texture mapping. (Wikipedia)

Yes, it's more technical but once we get the documentation in place I think the community will respond with a useful collection of scripts and presets.

[Andy Somerfield]

All,

Documentation for this feature is still being written - hopefully not long now..

Thanks,

A

[acapstick]

R-C-R/Polygonius,

The procedural texture filter documentation is accessible from the integrated Help's Filters and effects>Colour filters topic.

You can also access it from Introduction>New features in this version topic along with all other 1.7 features.

\Andy Capstick

 

[Polygonius]

8 minutes ago, acapstick said:

The procedural texture filter documentation is accessible from the integrated Help's Filters and effects>Colour filters topic.

Nope, not in my native version. But i´m hopeful it will coming soon! Thank you!

[R C-R]

21 minutes ago, Polygonius said:

Nope, not in my native version. But i´m hopeful it will coming soon! Thank you!

It was not there for me either, until I (I guess) forced an update to the built-in help by entering "Voronoi" in the open Help window's search box & waited for the tiny little blue progress bar in the window header to complete.

Now I have all the filters listed in the "Colour filters" help topics:

That also added the previously missing Introduction > "New features in this version" topic.

[R C-R]

Well! Now that I can access the procedural texture filter documentation, it is somewhat less helpful than I had hoped for. For example, there is nothing that explains the differences among the numbered vector creation types (just vec2, vec3, & so on) or what some of the (many!) oscillators are based on. There is also no explanation of how multiple terms in equations separated by semi-colons combine.

There also seems to be a minor error for the "Harmonic Perlin Noise" category -- if it like the other harmonic ones, it should return -1 to 1, but it says "(Returning 0 to 1)."

Some of this I can probably figure out on my own by experimenting with the built-in presets, but I expect more comprehensive documentation from help topics, or at least supplemental documentation online somewhere to fill in the gaps.

[acapstick]

R-C-R,

We are in Beta at the moment and I'm expecting more input from our developers and or course Beta testers. I'm hoping to have comprehensive documentation for release.

\Andy

[Patrick Connor]

1 hour ago, Polygonius said:

Nope, not in my native version. But i´m hopeful it will coming soon! Thank you!

Which language please? the inclusion and localsation of the 1.7 help changes has not been done yet afaik

[Polygonius]

8 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Which language please? the inclusion and localsation of the 1.7 help changes has not been done yet afaik

Its german. And its ok, i can wait some days. No hurry - If i read the RCR post-- so it needs some corrections/adds - all the stuff which really needs explaining seems not written yet.   So write it first ready, before translating half-ready stuff. 

[R C-R]

44 minutes ago, acapstick said:

We are in Beta at the moment and I'm expecting more input from our developers and or course Beta testers. I'm hoping to have comprehensive documentation for release.

Good to know, but as I am sure you understand it is going to be difficult for beta testers to provide very much relevant input without more info than is currently available to us. If nothing else, a few appropriately titled posts in this beta forum focusing on one of the function categories or the combining syntax, with a few examples & attached exported custom presets would help.

Once the final version is released, I also hope you will consider adding several topics to the Affinity Spotlight site as well. 

[Polygonius]

Eg. for special equations - is it possible to get conical-FX like in the gradient, with pseudo 3D light/shadow... how is the (sub) equation for this? It would be really nice if such examples would deep (mathematically/equation-order) explained.

[R C-R]

So far, the only perhaps non-so-obvious thing I have figured out is "var" followed by a space begins the definition of a user defined variable. The format is the variable name followed by the equal sign followed by the equation that defines it, followed by a semicolon that marks the end of the variable definition. So for example, the Ripples preset is:
var v=vec2(rx,ry)*(c/w); noisesc(v+(udirsc(v)*t))
where the variable "v" is defined as "vec2(rx,ry)*(c/w)" & is used twice in the noisesc equation.

There can be more than one variable, but from what I can tell none of the built-in presets include more than one. The space after "var" is required but spaces between other terms are optional & can be added for clarity. So for example var v = vec2 (rx,ry)*(c/w); noisesc (v + (udirsc (v)*t)) is functionally the same as the built-in Ripples preset.

[Polygonius]

Thank you!

Is the "2" behind "vec" a multiplyer or static-part of that "function"? I guess the "c" behind noise is the for the modifyer-"slider" which is connected to "c"????? 

If this are multplyers so, they do not need an * direct behind a name/function???

[R C-R]

The 2 is part of the function name. There is no "vec1" but there are "vec2" through "vec6" mentioned in the UK help topic in the "Vector creation" section. From what (little!) I can tell from the Usage column, the number refers to the number of arguments the function can have. So for example "vec2" takes 2 arguments, "vec3" takes 3, & so on ... except that all of them also accepts a single argument. 

"c" is the "Square count" input & "t" is the "Turbulance" (UK spelling) input.

I don't know if this will be of any help for you but on Macs the path to the folder for all the UK filter help topics is:
/Applications/Affinity Photo Beta.app/Contents/Resources/AffinityPhoto.help/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/pages/Filters

If you open that folder in Finder, look for the file named filter_proceduraltexture.html. If it is there, double-click on it & it should open in your default browser. If it is not there, maybe doing a search on "voronoi" in the open Help topics window (like I did) will force an update & it will be added to the folder.

[Polygonius]

3 minutes ago, R C-R said:

 mentioned in the UK help topic in the "Vector creation" section.

Not in german, but yeah

14 minutes ago, R C-R said:

/Applications/Affinity Photo Beta.app/Contents/Resources/AffinityPhoto.help/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/pages/Filters

here i got it thank you. Ok, will read it first... will need some minutes;-) 

BTW: do you know where the BETA located its "user" stuff? Must be a complete other path than user/library/containars/com.seriflabs.... 

[Alfred]

19 minutes ago, R C-R said:

"Turbulance" (UK spelling)

Or rather, UK misspelling! Like “independence”, it should be spelled “-ence” rather than “-ance”.

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, Polygonius said:

BTW: do you know where the BETA located its "user" stuff? Must be a complete other path than user/library/containars/com.seriflabs.... 

~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Photo Beta/user/

No idea why the betas store that stuff in Application Support rather than Containers, or don't use the 'reverse URL' naming convention.

[Polygonius]

Thanks!

[Andrew Buckle]

Good to see some help in the mac help but this feature alone surely should have a 200+ page book on the subject as the notes include very vague notes such as rotate vector left or vector right as well as things like negrg(V) or scurveinterp etc - certain there are many out there that understand that but personally, no idea. Possibly some notes on how cubicinterp can be used or where it maybe even used ? It is an amazing feature but one where only 1% of the power of the filter will ever be used. 

 

Possible to add an if statement such as (R>G)?R:G etc or (R>125)?R:0 etc

[John Rostron]

On 11/25/2018 at 7:10 PM, Andy Somerfield said:

All,

Documentation for this feature is still being written - hopefully not long now..

Thanks,

A

As @R C-R has said, the documentation on Procedural Textures is less than helpful.  In the meantime, could the devs possibly point us to external sites which explain what these functions are implementing. The only one I have found so far is this one from  ;Shea McCombs which gives a good introduction, enough to get me started.

Although this thread is in the Photo Beta on the Mac, I am using AP 1.7 on Windows.

John

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, John Rostron said:

The only one I have found so far is this one from  ;Shea McCombs which gives a good introduction, enough to get me started.

Thanks very much for the link. I browsed through it briefly & have bookmarked it for future reference & further study.

[Alfred]

4 hours ago, John Rostron said:

The only one I have found so far is this one from  ;Shea McCombs which gives a good introduction, enough to get me started.

I love this bit at the top of the page:

Quote

Shea McCombs
Technical Artist
Mad Scientist

 

[John Rostron]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I love this bit at the top of the page:

 

My ageing eyes did not pick up on the small print. Well spotted!

John