Shader

Any image, movie or shader.

Sample Width & Height

The Sample size of the shader. Bigger sizes take longer to process.


Resolution

A convenience function to quickly reduce or increase the size of the sample area. (lower = faster, higher = slower)


Channel

Select what you want to use use from the shader result.

  1. Grey
  2. Color
  3. Alpha
  4. Contour (with multiple levels and displacement)


Alpha sampling samples an the alpha channel of an image or shader. Obviously this only applies to images or shaders which actually have an alpha channel.


Contour mode gives you multiple levels of contour.

i.e. for a simple noise shader you would get something like this:

5 levels:

10 levels:

5 levels and displacement set to 100

This is full animatable, and can be combined with other shaders and fields, etc.



Select & Tolerance

  • Select which color you want to vectorize from, and how fuzzy(Tolerant) the color match selection should be. 
  • Low tolerance levels will vectorize colors which are nearer to your color selection. 
  • Higher tolerance levels will include a wider range of colors.
  • i.e. 1%  will only vectorize almost exactly your chosen color, but 100% will select everything. So you want a value somewhere in the middle.
  • Best is to pick a color, and adjust the tolerance to get what you want.

Invert

Inverts everything.


Curve Samples

  • by increasing the curve samples you increase your final point count, but you get a more accurate/smoother result. Setting this to 1 or greater increases compute time, and memory usage exponentially, but returns better results. Best is to increase this to 1 or 2, but there is no real advantage to giving this a high value as the returns diminish above 3.
  • If you want to smooth the result from a low res input image, it is recommended to set this to 1 or 2, rather than enabling "Smooth Outline".  
  • Curve samples is pre process, and happens before the spline is generated.


Smooth Outline

  • Smooths the final result before returning the result the generator. This is the final step. It is often better to increase Curve Samples by a small number, rather than smoothing final output.
  • Post process (happens after the spline was generated)



TIP:

 if you have an input shader (or texture) which takes a while to calculate, and it is not animated, you can delete the shader to speed things up. The result before you deleted is retained in memory. This memory map is retained as long as you do not change the Sample resolution. if you change the sample resolution, and it flushes the memory map, simply press ctrl-z to undo, and it will recover the memory Map.  This is much faster if you are trying to get the effect of a fixed noise map in combination with a field.