NomBot

Thanks everyone. And Eli, I was not expecting that! very clever. And Red, I might take you up on that, if I find the time. Seems like a bit of work, but someone needs to bell the cat.

Here's something that might be fun to play with, whether it's useful or not. It draws cardinal splines, colors them with various brush settings, rotates them etc. For me it was an exercise in GDI+ and OptionBased UI. Any bug reports or suggestions welcome... Found under Effects>Render menu. UI: Option: controls the randomness of the splines. Rotations: how many copies of the spline around a circle. Tension: controls the spline tension, how jagged or 'loopy'. Angle: rotates the splines. Sigma Focus: gradient center. Sigma Scale: gradient falloff. Gradation Size: size of the gradient rectangle. Zoom: zoom in or out. Draw/Fill/Both: how to paint the splines. Color tabs: select Pen/Alt/Bgd colors. Path Brush Draw/Fill: use path brush on either draw or fill. Path Controls: click drop-down to display more path options. AntiAlias: set smoothing mode. Points: click drop-down to display/change point data Menu Button: allows saving and loading of options and other cool stuff. Installation: Unzip "mandala.zip" and copy the following files: mandala.dll, mandala.dlc into the Effects folder of your Paint.NET installation. A typical location is "C:\Program Files\Paint.NET\Effects". OptionBasedLibrary v0.7.9.dll, OptionBasedLibrary v0.7.9.dlc into the folder of your Paint.NET installation (not into the Effects folder!). (unless it is already there, then you can skip this step) A typical location is "C:\Program Files\Paint.NET". Thanks to Midora for the optionBased library and to toe_head2001 for examples of using it. Enjoy. mandala.zip

As they say about whisky, 'they're all good but some are better than others' (I'm looking at you, caol ila and lagavulin) it's also true about tartans. Now I need to drag my tartan out and try to reproduce it with this plugin. But first I'll look at your code, which I've learned a lot from. toe_head2001, This is a great plugin and I appreciate the work that went into it.

Eli, that's just fantastic .... amazing use of the effect.

I know mosaic effects have been done before, but hopefully this one is different enough that someone will find it useful. Uses path brush settings. (Found under Artistic) User Interface: Control size: Sliders determine average size of tiles in pixels. Otherwise they determine how many tiles across and down. Tesserae across & Tesserae down: will also affect image due to changes in sampling. lock: when selected, the above sliders will be locked together. Tile irregularity: variation from square tiles to more irregular. Cement Thickness: pixel width between tiles. Cement Color: color between tiles. Reseed: generates new random tile shapes Blend Factors/Positions: These affect the path brush, Something to experiment with. AntiAlias: Does what it says, hopefully Here's an example of a more abstract effect with different brush settings: Tesserae.zip

Thanks, Toe_head! would have taken me a while to figure that one out on my own ...

Update: Good news, OptionBasedEffects can do what I wanted to do (update UI behind-the-scenes etc) ... and I like the look and feel of it better than WinForms. minor snag: can't get the OptionDoubleVectorPan control to work, wondering if anyone has used it in a plugin. OptionDoubleVectorPan(OptionNames.VecPan,optContext,0.5,0.0,1.0,0.5,0.0,1.0), gives me a System.OverflowException: Overflow error.

Thanks Rick, That makes sense now that I think about it. And thanks for your work developing Paint.NET... hat's off

just to clarify: ops = GetOpts(filePath); Amount1Control.SetValueDisplayName(Amount1Options.Amount1Option1, ops[1]); etc. if that makes sense ... doesn't do what I wanted it to do

Toe_head2001, as a sort of Scot, I read your Tartan, briefly. and it was good coding. and a good plugin. and I think I'll need to delve into WinForms to do what i want to do, and i'm a c# noob. edit: Looks like what you did there is the way to go. Thanks

hi toe_head2001, XML serializer is something I need to look into. but this is what I want to do: 1. user enters settings in UI. 2. this is saved to a file. 3. plugin reads the file. 4. plugin alters UI based on the file.(persistent save of UI option) without user restarting the plugin. I can't figure out how to do that... also looked at optionbased, but can it get around the problem? and is there any doc for this other than play it by ear?

Thanks, BoltBait. I guess that explains why trying to change the UI wasn't working for me ... What I'm trying to do is read from a file then alter the UI based on that. Any tips on doing this while avoiding indirect UI?

I'm looking for a way to restart a plugin (as if the user cancelled then reopened it) but without the user actually doing that. If it's possible, what's the safest way of doing it? In other words, what gets called when 'cancel' is pressed and when the plugin is reopened?

not even sure how you did that, but the color balance works ...

that looks like element synthesis in an exploding star to me... i like this