home  >  software  >  Studio580

Overview

Studio580 is an interactive, style-adaptive, non-photorealistic digital painting system. It forms part of a long tradition in non-photorealistic computer graphics research that has explored ways to capture the richness, expressiveness, and immediacy of traditional artistic styles and media—like oils, watercolor, and pen-and-ink—with digital tools. But Studio580 differs from other systems of the same kind in that its style-adaptive design does not limit it to the simulation of just a handful of pre-determined styles or media. Unlike these similar (but style-determined) systems, Studio580 can simulate any artistic style that can be captured by its probability model.

Studio580’s style-adaptive engine works as follows. The user provides a small, square image called the source image or exemplar. The source image is paradigmatic of—or captures the essence of—some artistic style or medium that the user wishes to simulate. Studio580 then uses an adaptive, multi-scale, Markov random field algorithm to develop a probability model of the distribution of color and tone across the surface of the user-provided source image. Once this probability model is constructed, it can be sampled as many times as necessary. Repeated sampling allows Studio580 to “grow” arbitrary amounts of image data that have the same spatial distribution of color and tone as the source image. Though constructing and sampling the probability model require intensive mathematical calculations, Studio580 retains interactive responsiveness in spite of such high computational demands by performing most of these calculations on the GPU. To see how all of this works in practice, two source images are shown alongside strokes grown from them in the figure below.



Project Directory

Downloads

The current version of Studio580 is 1.0 pre-release 4 of Thursday, February 12, 2009 @ 10:16pm.

Click here to proceed to the download landing page, where you can view system requirements and download the current binary package, additional brush kits, and source code.

Screenshots

  Windows XP Windows Vista
Splash Screen
Main Window
Brush Options Dialog

User Documentation

Quick Tour

Guide to Installing Readymade Brushes

Problems, Annoyances & Workarounds

Brush Creation Guide

Tips & Tricks Guide

Art Gallery

Still Life with Cup & Saucer
Painted in Studio580 version 1.0 pre-release 0. Included along the bottom of the image are the source images from which the brush strokes in the main image are grown.
Shaded Ball
Painted in Studio580 version 1.0 pre-release 3. The light and shade effects in this image were with created using the techniques described in the “Light and Shade” section on page 3 of the Tips & Tricks Guide

Academic Writing

On the Writings page, you download a partial draft of a research paper on Studio580 in Adobe Acrobat (*.pdf) format. Once completed, it will be submitted to journals and conferences. If you’re interested in gaining a much deeper understanding why Studio580 is innovative and how it works, check it out.

Future Directions

Studio580 remains a work in progress. To read about planned future developments and refinements, or to suggest one of your own, click here to visit the Future Directions page.