Brushes


Selecting Brushes

The group of colored icons in the BRUSHES panel are brushes to paint with. Click one to make it the current brush. The current brush is used to paint the animation. The current brush is highlighted by a green outline.


Loading Brushes

Clicking the arrow at the upper right of a brush listing will open a popup menu. At the top of the popup menu is an "Attachments..." command. Below the command is a list of brushes available on your hard drive that can be loaded. Select the name to load the item into that position. Brushes will not load if there is not enough memory to load them. To make the popup menu go away, click anywhere outside of the popup menu.


Previewing Brushes on Your Hard Drive

You can preview a brush on your hard drive by pausing the cursor over the name in the popup menu. A preview will appear in the upper left panel of the Controls Window. When previewing brushes on a Macintosh, the preview will indicate if there is enough memory to load the desired item.


Increasing Memory for Brushes

To increase memory to load larger brushes on a Macintosh, highlight the Vusic application icon and select "Get Info" from the File Menu. Within the "Memory" panel there is a text box named "Preferred Size." Type in a larger number such as 10,000 to allocate more memory to the Vusic application.


Brush Trails

A brush can leave a trail of afterimages. You can turn this feature on or off. Click on the Brush Trails button or press the "A" key to toggle this feature.


Brush Settings Panel

Click the brush icon to open the BRUSH SETTINGS Panel. This panel allows you to change the speed of the brush drawing, save a brush set, or apply a brush effect.

Brush Speed Slider: Drag the slider to adjust the brush speed. The speed is defined by the number of animation frames per second. Note: The maximum brush speed is dependent on the speed of your computer.

Brush Set Popup: If you like a certain set of brushes, you can save the set to your hard drive and recall the set at any time. You can save the set to any name that is 15 characters or less. When you save a brush set, any brush attachments are also saved. You can load a set by selecting it from the popup menu by name. Once loaded, the set name will display in the text box. However, once a new item is loaded, the text box will display "(None)". The item that was highlighted when the set was saved is made the active item when the set is loaded.

Brush Effects Popup: Brush effects control how the current brush scales in size. Scaling may be based on music volume or screen position. To load an effect, click on any of the listed effects in the popup menu. The default effect has the name "(None)". If you use an effect that is not "(None)", the program will run a little slower since the effects require more computer processing.


Brush Attachments

You can attach settings to any particular brush. Whenever a brush with attachments is chosen to be the current brush, the attached settings are applied also. To access a brush's attachment panel, click on the arrow at the upper right corner of the brush listing for which you want to set an attachment. Then, click the first line ("Attachments...") in the popup menu that appears. From the panel displayed at the upper right, you can choose from 6 different panels to attach brush and color effects, fills, trails, gradients, movements, brush speed, color speed, movement spread, or brightness. The first appearing attachment panel allows you to attach a brush effect or brush speed. Use the popup menu at the top of the panel to select other attachment panels. Drag sliders or select from popup menus to create an attachment. To remove an attachment, select "No Attachment" from a popup menu or drag a slider to the far left or right. Loading a new brush into a position that has attachments will cause the attachments for the previous brush to be lost.

When an attachment is activated, the new setting remains until another brush is selected. Selecting another brush will restore the setting to its previous value before the attachment was activated, if the new brush does not have a corresponding attachment.

If the currently selected brush has an attached setting, you will not be able to change that setting using normal methods. You must first detach that setting from that brush before you can change it. Loading a new brush or the same brush into a position that has attachments will cause the attachments for the previous brush to be cleared.


Fixed Color Brushes

Some brushes use fixed colors. When fixed-color brushes are used, the current gradient is replaced by these fixed colors and the gradient does not animate. Note than when a brush that does not use fixed colors is selected afterwards, any trails or afterimages will be displayed in the current gradient colors and not the previous fixed colors.


Keyboard Shortcuts

A (Afterimage) will toggle brush stroke trails.
B (Brush) will trigger a brush change. Set a specific brush by typing 1 to 6 first.
S (Speed) will update the brush speed. Must be preceded by typing 0 to 120 first.
W (Wipe) will wipe the screen of all brush strokes.


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