Organic bristle marks

Hey , left comment on youtubes about it but wanted to post on forums as well while doing experiments and get some feedback cause im quite new here so maybe there are some ways to get that kind of organic bristle marks.
Currently in Verve bristle marks consist of ovals which are stretched into eggs etc, in real life with real brushes this kind of shape never happens, its quite impossible to just touch the canvas with brush and in close up see oval/circle shaped marks, so i had this question to taron about making other shaped bristle marks, which could get diamond/triangle shape or some other non oval shape that wont feel so digital.Here is example of what i mean, this is in Verve:

It just looks too digital, also because of feathering around circles it looks like airbrushing while in real world bristle marks are never that semitransparent around edges, so it would be nice to get rid of that semi transparent edge if possible , on all brushes, cause after testing i realized that brush 2 has least amount of this edge feathering/blur which makes it most resembling actual real life bristle.
In real paintings bristle gets that triangulated shape after pushed against canvas, i thinkg this would change overall look of the paintings and make them more like real life emulations of paintings, of course all this could be optional but also would be nice if it would be default, so if we would like these round shaped bristle marks then we could switch back to that.I believe only toothbrush trick to create starts can create these circles, but thats of course very random form and used as effect, so you touch white paint with toothbrush and slide your finger over brush so it will drop small circle shaped stars... and thats how to get circles as effect , during actual painting with brush it simply never happens.

Some actual paintings, bristle marks are never oval shaped:

Yes i know these were made with brush tip or with sponge but still its never a circle, more like diamond randomly stretched, and no blur around edges.
So if we could get this kind of shape from the beginning with big bristle size settings then it would be great, doesnt have to be that random but at least having that other organic shape would change a lot.
Here are some tree tests i did with brush2 and on the far top right are test using custom brush as triangle shape which still doesnt work that well cause its still somehow semi transparent too much around edges... too much smudge effect.Best way would be to incorporate different shaped bristle marks besides stretched circles IMO.

So what do you think? In my opinion this is kinda very foundation to emulating actual brush and verve emulates other aspects VERY VERY nice, so this small detail could only improve it.

[Taron]

Ah, you made it here.
Verve is still an infant. But it's a powerful infant, if you understand what to do with it.
Thank you for your advice and suggestions, of course! I know what you're after, but I'd love to help gain more clarity over what those round blobs are before you lose your faith in me as quickly as you've found it, haha.

All brush stuff is still super crude and bristle marks are round, because they are polygons with a radial gradient shader on them, not because I figured they are the ideal solution. They actually are, though, you just misinterpret what you're looking at, really. What you call bristle marks are actually entire brush tip marks. A bristle is a single hair and the tip of it leaves a round impression. Move it as you stipple and it becomes more of a streak.The first brushes I've developed were specifically there to emulate the stroke and stipple effect one would get with wet on wet oil painting techniques. Doing it right would mean to embrace that type of action and nature of them.

You are thinking of photoshop brushes or painter or what not, you know. I agree and that's why I even made a whole new nature of brush with the images and brush #9 to do all the photoshoppy stuff people are so used to. And it's fun, really...I'm pretty psyched about it, too!
It is my plan to throw all brushes on the trash and replace the engine so that you have full control over everything, but I'm a little afraid that some people might miss the chance to realize what Verve can really do for them.

Anyhow...features in Verve keep growing steadily and the brush stuff really has to grow up soon, too!
Very cute trees, by the way! Looking forward to your gallery thread!

Yes i realize that on my examples of real brush strokes they wer emade one by one using entire brush tip or multiple of them with sponge.
I dont know how this brush engine is build , just asking if it would be much work to introduce diamond shaped gradient polygons ? Even as a test build, also setting to enable /disable blurring on edges.Goal is to make every stroke from brush like real painting, cause this example on first picture with circular paint marks looks too perfect, too digital, in real world it would be kinda circular but not so much and when we do circles when paiting then we do them big (sun,planets etc) or tiny small using toothbrush and paint splatters.For everything else we have organic strokes and brush trials arent perfectly circular.
Do you think new diamont polygon gradient shape needs new brush engine ? It doesnt have to be perfect, just circles are too perfect to use them with scaled up brush, you have to go back and tweak etc, with diamond shape you can leave it as is and it looks organic if you know what i mean.
Because you know... i know i alreadyt can use entire brush and do it like this :

And this is how they did it probably on my examples from real paintings, but would be very nice to have that kind of strokes instead of circles when you enlarge tiny brush trails so i can just tap tap like stamp and i already have nice organic shapes.It just takes longer to create leaves one by one or any organic /random shape from nature, with non circular brush trails it would be instant, tap and there you go nice organic trail.

[Taron]

Ahahaha, I just did you one better, just to see what it does, hehehe!
I hooked up the images to brush#1, which is something I wanted to do for all brush styles anyway, but it instantly gives some fun results.

However, I still need to work more complexity into it, like how it chooses the images, if you have a sequence, as well as rotating the images, which is a bit trickier on those first brushes, because they've got the fancy dynamic stretching that was almost trivial with a simple quad, but gets evil with rotating images on them.

You will soon notice that the way I go about Verve is totally evolutionary. That means, we're having a stage of early microbes at this point, hahaha, now we need to grow some teeth, I guess!

I'll have a proper implementation in the next version. But there is so much stuff coming now, it's going to be pretty thick of a release, if all goes well.

Thanks, bwwd (is that ?), we'll have some good fun together, I think! I can sense some powers in you for sure!

haha yeah im on verve non stop experimenting , trying to match my real watercolour tests with verve tests etc to buildup my own workflow and know what to do to get watercolour look and what makes this look "too fake" so, its mostly tests now , what to avoid for oil and whats useful for oils look, whats more useful for watercolor etc, cause this software i sooo customizable, and im not a big fan of mixing media on real paper/canvas but here i see it gives more seamless results , i actually enjoy working in verve much more than with real paint.
I read about that UNDO problem as well i immediately realised that something must be up if there is only one undo.. maybe if mode is "=" so it wont add virtual paint to canvas then it would be easier to UNDO brush trails ? Cause there wont be anything but colour on canvas ? so maybe undo could work well in "=" mode and in ">" mode it would be just one undo ? Or if you have fluid on canvas then undo works only once as well, and after drying you can undo multiple times again if you go to "=" mode and add only colour ?
Im not sure what exactly is causing multiple undos problem but maybe flatting paint or drying canvas could solve this ? So after drying and flatting paint you have multiple UNDO steps again cause its just colour to undo without any physics going on to undo... i hope its quite clear explanation.
Also F1 brings forum manual but if someone doesnt have internet on machine or isnt online hes alone on his own , i believe all shortcuts should be somewhere hidden in progam in form of text even copy pasted from forums, anything is still better than no info , so ifi would like to leave this software for kids to have fun then they have no info about shortcuts without internet, i respect that its totally self though gui and its great but we do need more info what this monster is capable of Cause its a bit scary and confusing for beginners, i had to restart a lot to get back to defauls, now im using ctrl+delete and its fine.
Ah one more thing, using delete to clean canvas doesnt clean water or brush buildup? At leats thats what i realized, after painting with water and leaving stacks of paint on canvas i pressed delete but my canvas still physically had some invisible leftovers of paint and water.I used shift + F to fill canvas then ive seen leftovers, it wasnt filled properly like if canvas was empty, it had leftover stacks of paint and water from previous painting.

[Taron]

Well, you have deduced properly where the problem is with undo: Fluids can go everywhere, modifying areas WELL beyond where you made your brush stroke. That makes it impossible to localize undo areas, creating a memory challenge. If we had unlimited memory, we could have unlimited undo. Further more, it's difficult to figure out how much graphics memory is left (at least to me), making it impossible to know how much the graphics card can still take.
Even with layers that is already a problem.
I could try to keep track of memory from my end, but there are other applications asking for memory and I couldn't possibly know how much they take away, you know.
SOOoooooo....you've mentioned something I thought of early on already, making a distinction between fluids on and off to determine whether I can go for a localized undo buffer. This would allow to have great many undo levels. I could even try to check for idle states to transfer some buffers into RAM and off the graphics card. But even there I will run into trouble, simply because BlitzMax only compiles for 32bit and the memory I can address will be used up quickly with images. Not to mention that this would get pretty hard to manage.
I will think of solutions, though, which is all part of the massive question, whether I can afford to dedicate myself to Verve fully, which is something I really want, but I have to work out a way to maintain my ideals for all of you, whilst making a living with it at the same time. It will get interesting.

NOW for the other point:
Verve is NOT a real media simulator. You can achieve some fascinating results in terms of "realism", but it has not been my objective to simulate actual materials. I noticed the power of fluid dynamics for painting and created a way to paint with them. Along the way I try to implement properties of reality that we could relate to in order to use Verve as intuitively as possible for our artistic impulses, while at the same time keeping it as fast as possible so that it can keep up with our motions. (The next version will make that connection even stronger!)
Soooooo...consider Verve its own medium. Like any new art medium, you have to develop a sense for how it reacts. Despite parallels to analogue media, it remains a digital approach and aims for letting you express your visions via its very own nature upon which you are meant to be able to rely in time.

As for left-overs after delete?!? Sometimes you have to delete after having clicked on the canvas to make sure it has it in focus. But other than that, this should not be even possible to happen. Make sure you don't have another layer underneath!

One more thing: Your signature here! You should put your system specs in there, especially your graphics card, so that I know a bit more where you're coming from with any potential issues!

Yeah , with layers copy i can live without multiple undos, simply making copy before trying out something risky on canvas in case i mess up on copied layer i can go back to original layer.
Maybe having cap to not go above 10 undo steps would be something ? cause 1 is extreme, 3 is kinda ok , 10 should be fine.Unlimited undo isnt that necessary but its just for mistakes, accidental brush strokes etc. im making 2/3 accidental strokes sometimes so about 10 undo steps should be fine.HAving no undo forces you to be better BUT its mostly about accidental strokes.

[Taron]

Yeah, I know. I've gotten so used to one undo that I don't even think about it anymore, but I totally understand.
CUTE Vervatar, by the way!
OH, and thanks for adding your signature! Looks like an ok system for sure!

Just so you know, you have one undo PER LAYER, meaning, each layer has one independent undo.

Oh one more idea that i had while adding shadows and highlights, i was trying out + mode (screen mode i suppose) to add highlights and its also easy to create ground very quickly using dark brown and it lights up texture slowly after every stroke, so in the end outcome is really nice so i was thinking how about having screen mode and multiply mode BUT with small modification , i mean as we know when we want to add shadow we tend to also go towards cold hue and when light then we add warm hue so maybe mixing this with screen and multiply would give nice effects from get go ? So multiply would also go towards cold hue with every stroke ? and screen mode would go towards warm hue ? Even better would be ability to control if you want more towards warm hue or cold hue during multiply or screen mode, kinda similar to hue controller in brush 9 but not that random, it would slowly go towards cold/warm hue.
That could speed up some work i guess.I dont think ive seen something like this in any software, usually screen or multiply works with the same hue.It could be tricky to not add too much saturation tho, i dont know
Or just regular multiply if there is screen mode already which works nice if controlled properly:

[Taron]

Nice idea, but you will really want to have simple control over this, which you have by simply choosing the right color.
Also, shadows only tend to become colder in hue, because ordinarily the sky's illumination and bounce gains strength over remaining lighting. Indoor situations could reverse that easily. Thus I would not want to impose any specific hue modulations of that nature on artists. However, I would want to offer artists to design their painting behaviors, of course. There, really, simplicity is paramount. You don't want to bury an artist in endlessly deep options. Especially when it's not necessary.

So, while Multiply is really, really try in Verve's fundamental logic, it remains part of my plan to hook that up as well. You do already have a working multiply mode for the layers, but it took some leaps through hoops to make it work. For brushes it will be trickier.
The toughest part there, though, is the user, because it may have some weird effects on blank canvases.

I've got so many little things to work out, it's crazy.

Anyway, thanks for engaging yourself so wonderfully! I hope you'll have enough time to make some more experiences with all the existing features, too, also to develop a feel for it all. The brush images will open up a whole new world to you, not only for obvious reasons, because there's much greater depth behind what you can do with those than meets the eye, so to say.
For example, you can have the colors of the image taken be used and tinted by your chosen color. This has countless applications for how you design your painting equipment, so to say. You could use images as a kind of swatches to modify your current color, for example. This way you could keep one color active, say for some object, but choose images to consider the lighting of that object, as well as texture, if you wished for that!

So, anyhow...lots more to come, I can promise that!