3. Beautiful non-destructive starry night in under 5 minutes with repeater and layered masks

Beautiful non-destructive starry night in under 5 minutes with repeater and layered masks

  • N

    Description

    The below gifs show how to make a beautiful starry night in a few minutes using repeaters and masks. Each GIF starts where the previous one ends.

    Important notes

    • the repeater content object ( star ) is grouped with an invisible square beforehand
      • this is necessary due to a common VS bug that occurs in many situations
      • the bug causes displacement with shapes, for which their visual center is different than their geometrical center
      • so here, omitting the group would have caused offset on expanding the repeater
      • many of the situations have already been fixed by @vectoradmin, so he'll likely fix this too very soon
    • the repeater for the mask is expanded
      • this is necessary, because there is some strangeness with repeater seed sync causing scheme changes to one repeater to reflect in others
      • this can currently be avoided by manually incrementing the randomization seed for scaling for new repeaters in the repeater scheme options
      • this change comes at the cost of having a differnet randomization obviously
      • since we need the mask to have the same, I expanded the repeater
    • one could easily style-define different
      • randomization schemes
      • mask settings
        .. as styles
    • one could then turn this sky into a symbol, have multiple instances of it and
      • apply overrides to them for customization
      • modify or replace the original star content accessible in the layers panel

    GIFS

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     3 Replies
  • S

    @Nils, great Work 👍

    I think van Gogh (because every time I read "Starry Night" it reminds me of him)
    would have been equally impressed 🙂

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  • N

    @vectoradmin @Subpath

    For anyone who reads / watches this tutorial in the future:

    To get around the issues with unwanted seed and content sync I outlined above, one has to maintain the following practices when working with repeaters:

    • never duplicate an existing repeater if you expect to customize the copy
    • duplicating in any mode ( even clone ) leads to the sync
    • instead, copy ( or clone, reference ) the objects that were used for creating it
    • then create a new repeater with the copies
    • if you want some randomization scheme to sync you..
      • copy the seed from the various modal views for the randomization schemes
      • paste it in the corresponding modal view for the new repeater
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     1 Reply
  • S

    @Nils thanks for the info.

    I must say that I am consistently impressed
    by your detailed observations and descriptions 👍
    Appreciate it very much

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  • @Nils the Repeater feature is something I want to dig into. Your tutorial will definitely help! Thank you for the detailed "video" lesson.
    I also appreciate the "Important notes" section, and calling out current bugs helps people understand if VS is not behaving as it should, making it easier to learn the tool.
    Well done!

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