ishani

OT note - I have been dragged away and distracted by work and other life stuff .. Genesis is basically ready to release though, I'll get it ready to go and record a bunch of How To videos to get people going with it as soon as I can. (Thank you for your efforts in that area, @Pixey !)

.. I should also mention - most if not all buttons & sliders have tooltips that can help decode what's going on in lieu of full documentation. Hover over the slider labels for the tips. You can pull a mask in from PDN, load it from a file on disk, paste it from the clipboard or turn a PDN selection into a B&W mask - those 4 buttons under the mask banner will take care of that.

Piling effects on top of each other until you end up with Art :p

Yep, any of the usual image formats will be fine - BMP, PNG, JPG, GIF, etc. Just happened to knock that mask out into a TIFF ...

While I'm writing up some docs/videos, here's a simple image set to play with if you want to experiment with masking but find it a bit confusing. Load the flower into PDN, fire up Genesis and click the "Load Mask" button And then load the .TIFF file provided. You can load some effects and see how it behaves - try setting the Mask Clipping value under Output to [INNER] .. and see what you can find... mask_example_flower.zip

Alpha 3 is posted; this version comes with both the AVX (for CPUs > 2012ish) and Generic (anything else) rendering engines, both of which have also had some further optimisation. A new interactive preview mode has been added that runs at 1/8th resolution to help keep things smooth. The UI has been tidied up a bit and some new mask clipping options added. Hopefully the HiDPI font scaling should be fixed. I'm going to focus on documentation / video tutorials next, and probably punt it out to the main publishing forum after that. The major bits of engineering beyond that will be resizable UI and some limited undo or checkpointing. Thanks for those who have helped poke at it so far!

Resizeable UI is on the list, but probably will come after the first release. I had targeting 1920x1080 and up for the current release. FWIW, you can click and drag any grey area on the UI to move the panel so even if it's overflowing the screen you can find the cancel/render buttons (or use ALT-F4)

Try the 'generic' alpha2 renderer I attached to a post earlier - it does not require AVX. Sorry for any confusion, an installer will sort these kind of issues out... @HyReZI'm interested to hear what kind of performance you get with it, I might need to add another lower-res option for interactive mode, or make the full-res preview trigger less often... I'm really keen to keep the iteration time down because I think it feels more fun to play with if you get near-immediate visual feedback.

Interesting, thanks. I did try switching scaling and things looked ok - I'll give it another run through and see if I can reproduce that.

FWIW if you have poor interactive performance, switch to quarter-resolution updates: (going to make that the default going forward)

Thanks for your testing, all! Some things for me to look into ASAP. If you've had problems with the plugin not initializing, you can try the version attached to this post - it should run on older CPUs too, but will be a bit slower generally. Plus, make sure you've got recent Visual Studio redistributables installed: https://aka.ms/vs/16/release/vc_redist.x64.exe But it's curious if alpha1 worked but alpha2 didn't .. @toe_head2001 Windows 7 might well not work, I certainly haven't tested that far back and the rendering engine is compiled against the Win 8.1 SDK . I'll check out the DPI scaling, looks like I need to adjust the font size choices properly (out of interest, what is your setup there?) Regenesis64.alpha2.generic.zip

Alpha 2 uploaded; couple of bug fixes, new colour controls to HSV-shift effects, some new effect files.

Could you let me know / send me: * the mask you're using * which effect you loaded * what the error was * your CPU details Thanks! EDIT: actually I think I know which one you ran into; have fixed that message pop-up for alpha-2, but loading very complex masks will slow things down, it has to do a lot more work when there are lots of small elements to analyse.

Okay, updated the OP, alpha 1 is ready to play with...

The plugin I'm building runs its own built-in preview window, so I don't tell PDN that anything is changing (ie. not calling FinishTokenUpdate or calling EffectTokenChanged while the user uses my config UI window) Once a user hits "OK" to render things out, I then want to get my OnRender() called - just the once - so I can push out the final result. My effect has a RenderingSchedule of EffectRenderingSchedule.None and I need to do all the work in a single call. I've got a solution where I embed an ID into the token and the Effect instance - if it matches in a OnRender() call (or if we're repeating the render) then we do the final result - but regardless, we change the ID in every call to OnRender() so it will only trigger once it's been through the UI. // some pseudocode... // in effect code protected override void OnRender( Rectangle[] rois, int startIndex, int length ) { if ( (Token.RenderFinal && localRenderFinal) || repeatEffect ) { // .. do the stuff } localRenderFinal = false } // in config form: private void HwRender_PanelClicked(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { (theEffectToken as MyEffectToken).RenderFinal = true (Effect as MyEffect).localRenderFinal = true FinishTokenUpdate(); Close(); } Hope that makes sense. The approach feels a little hacky and I wanted to check if there was something more standard? I have had a search and found the post where Rick describes some of the plugin internal call flow (and I've done my own tracing / ILSpy) but I couldn't see anything that was quite in this direction ...

To avoid confusion - The plugin I'll be testing soon / releasing is a new thing, not the old Photoshop plugin running on PSFilterPdn. It's a native Paint.NET plugin running a totally re-engineered effects engine. While you can use the old one, this new edition will be a much more fun experience. @Pixey I'll get a version of it up on here soon, just tidying some things up first!

It is, and does! I must thank you for your PS filter plugin, it has been really useful for testing the old versions I managed to dig up .. and I'll be using it for generating new FX to ship with this rewrite. The whole lot will be released as source eventually too - plus I need to do an expanded blog post on my site...

Hello all, [UPDATE 2019.05.18] Alpha 3 version of GenesisVFX PDN is ready to play with. You can download the package here : GenesisVFX.PDN.alpha3.7z (24,321,853 bytes, CRC64 F380A0C948806F39) Link broken, please see Zip at the bottom of this page @Pixey IMPORTANT Currently Genesis is a 64-bit only effect and has only been tested against Paint.NET 4.1.6. There are two different rendering back-ends to choose from, depending on how recent a CPU you have in your PC. The "AVX" option is for more modern CPUs (probably anything post-2012 is safe) and provides considerable performance improvements. The "Generic" option should run on anything. ALPHA INSTALLATION Unpack the 7z somewhere See above about which engine to use, AVX or Generic Copy the contents of \Install-<engine>\Effects into your PDN install Effects directory, eg. C:\Program Files\paint.net\Effects\ If this is the first time you've installed Genesis, please run the redistributable installer in \Install-<engine>\Redistributable\ Run Paint.NET, load an image and navigate to Effects -> Render -> GenesisVFX On the first run, you won't have any effect packs loaded. Click on the folder icon top-left to browse - go pick the \EffectLibrary directory in the place you unpacked the 7z. You can then click on thumbnails to load effects. Click on the preview windows to set effect centres. Try loading some masks (\Examples\Masks). Try hitting Randomize up top right. Good luck! NOTES I've been testing it a bunch but obviously it's got quite a few moving parts, so your mileage may vary! I am really keen to hear all constructive feedback. I need to write or video a few tutorials to get people up to speed... alpha3.zip