Working with nozzle files

We've taken a look at how to control the Image Hose and what content comes out of it. Now we're going to take a look at that content which is in the form of nozzle files, and I'll just show you a couple of them, and then we'll get into, how do you create one of these? And let's go over to the Content Selector and drop down to the third button, which is our nozzle file selector. And let's just grab this one and I'll just paint with it a bit. So I'm controlling it by pressure and it's coming out in a random fashion.

And you can see what happens is, now I'm actually drawing with these really interesting kind of three-dimensional cubes. And how else would you get some kind of interesting font that does this unless you had a tool like the Image Hose to do it? That's where the power of the Image Hose is, is that anything can become content and in this case, just playing around with it, it struck me that it's actually an interesting expressive mark-making tool, in this case, that I can control through pressure, and it just comes up with a kind of content that you would never get from any kind of traditional tool.

So that's one of the interesting things about the way these nozzle files work. They can be called into service for so many different things. Let's try a different kind of nozzle file here. I'm going to go with Urban Fixtures, and I want to show you here, in this case, this wouldn't be the kind of control I'd want over it. These lighting fixtures and signs. Really, you don't want them to just come out at any angle. Although I suppose you could find a case where that might be useful if you wanted to do what does it look like in a tornado.

But normally, you want to have these all standing straight up. And so, what I don't want is a random angle about it. So if I just remove the angular aspect of control and just say, hey, I just want to spray that, it's just pressure control. Now I can spray this and they're going to all be upright as they should be, and I can control their size by the amount of pressure that I'm doing. One last one I want to show you here that's kind of interesting, and shows you another take on how these can be useful is, I'm going to go here to the Stone Wall.

And this one will work fine with just size pressure, but I wanted to show you how the way this was constructed as a set of kind of irregular elements in a stone wall, lets me draw with this, so that pressure can control how big the stone elements look. And all of the elements come out, not in a random jumble, but as they were originally oriented in the original wall that they were photographed from. And so, being able to do this just a little bit you can see how it's not an unlimited set of elements.

There are probably 8 or 10 or so elements in there. I can easily come up with what looks to be a very random texture. And that's a case of where this becomes a very useful tool where you want to create textures that appear random, and yet it's coming from a subset of elements that's not infinite. You know, if I start looking around here, I see this here, and this here, and I thought I saw another one over here, but because they're at different scales, that starts to hide the fact that there aren't an infinite number of elements in this.

But the idea is disguising repetition through things like randomness or size change. You can very effectively create what looks to be a very convincing random brick wall, where any other way to do that would be rather difficult. And here we just spayed it out in a few moments. So this is another case of how you can construct elements that can do a very specific type of things. The last thing I want to say before we get in here.

I'm just going to draw a couple of these. The way these were done, it does take some time. First a photographic beginning had to come to get these elements, and then they had to be individually cut out as layer elements. So I was using selection tools in order to do that in creating individual elements as I constructed it. And then I created enough of them so that they don't seem to be repeating too often. This does get into a little bit more of complex nozzle-making, but it does show you that if you invest the time to, in this case, photograph something that has a almost puzzle-like break-apart quality to it, you can then use selection tools and layering in Painter to create these individual elements.

And now that we're talking about that, let's actually create a Nozzle element. And the way it's done is through layers. Anything you want to be a Nozzle element ultimately has to start life as an individual layer. And I'm going to go and just get a very different tool here. We'll just grab some Chalk. And what I want to do is create the word Painter so that it comes out with the individual letters just in a random fashion.

So for each element, I'm going to need to create a new layer. So here's Layer number 1. I'm going to want to change color for each of these. So I'll call up my Color palette. And on this layer, I'm going to do P for Painter. Then I'm going to create a new element, change the color, do an A, and just go through this procedure one element at a time so that I end up with all of the letters of the word Painter on individual layers. One more for T. You don't even need to arrange these in a logical fashion.

They can be arranged anyhow you want. You know, I could put the E over here, because they're going to all be individual elements coming out randomly anyway. So we've got seven layers, each one representing one of the letters in the word Painter. Next thing I need to do is group all of these together. So if I just go up here, I can say Select All layers. So first we select them, and then I go back up and I'll say now I want to group the layers. So now we've got those seven letter layers in a single group.

That is the format you have to present the nozzle-making capability in order for it to know what to do with it. So they have to be grouped together. The other thing I'm going to tell you before I even get to making these, it makes sense to save your elements in this format right now, because you may want to come back later and somebody may say, why don't you put 1 and 2 in there so it includes version of Painter. So that'll be all of the letters and the numbers of Painter 12 will come out of your nozzle. So if I save this file, and it has to be in the RIFF format, I can always come back here, make a couple more layers, put a 1 on one layer, a 2 on the other layer, put it into this group, and then I'll be able to use this group to make another nozzle that also includes more Nozzle elements.

So what we're going to do now is take this group and convert it into a nozzle. To do that, we'll go up to the Window menu. If we go to the Media Library Panels, we want to go to Nozzles. We will just move this over here. In the flyout menu for Nozzle Libraries we'll find there is a command, Make Nozzle From Group. Well, we've got our group, so we want to make a nozzle from it. So we'll just hit this command and what it will do is it'll make a new file. What it quickly does is it looks at the height and width of all of these elements as they would fit in a rectangle.

And then they make a grid using the largest widths and heights to put all of these elements in. So this will become the nozzle file and all I need to do at this point is save it as a RIFF file. So we'll go ahead and we'll say Save As. I'm going to want to save this in the chapter12 exercise folder, and we'll go ahead and we'll just call this Painter Letters. We're one step away from spraying this out now. So go ahead and save it.

At this point I can close that file. What we want to do now is also go ahead and save this is as our master file. So once again, I'm going to call this Painter Letters, but I'm going to call it Master. So this will let me know that this is the actual file with the groups in it. It's not the flattened gridded file. This is the file I can always come back to and add more content to. So I'll have that just in case I ever want to change it. Now the final thing we have to do is we have to load the nozzle file.

It's not in any library at this point. It's just an independent file that is a nozzle file. So I can go ahead and close this and we'll create a new image to spray on, and we'll go back up to the Nozzle Libraries flyout menu, and we'll say Load Nozzle. So we'll click on that. And let's go back to our exercise file, in chapter12, and we want to grab the Painter Letters file.

That's the one that was flattened with a black background and so we'll grab that. And now that nozzle file is loaded, nothing changes to tell you that other than you've just loaded it. But if you now go to our nozzle file, I can now spray that out. Now you see it's coming out randomly and I'm rotating it. If I don't want to do that, once again, this is where you consider, how do I want this to come out? Well maybe I want to control the size, but I don't want the letters to be all rotating like that. So something simple like just Spray-Size-P.

Now they're coming out -- all the letters randomly, but they're not rotating anymore. Now finally, you have this independent nozzle file, but you may say, I want to use this so I'm going to be creating a library with a bunch of different things in it. So what I want to do at this point is add this nozzle that I've created to a library. And there can only be one nozzle active at a time, which right now is this Painter Letter Nozzle. So if I want to save it to a library, I have to be sure that's the active nozzle, and we do indeed know that that's correct.

But once again we go back to our Nozzle Libraries flyout menu and I can say Add Nozzle to Library. So I go ahead in here and whatever we name it is going to be what its name will be in the library. So we no longer need the RIFF format designation at the end of it. We'll just say OK. Sometimes you have to close the Library panel and open it back up for it to be registered in the display here. So let's go ahead and we'll close this, and then we'll go back and open it up. And there it is.

So it's now in the library. So that lets me go here and I can play with this and then if I want to select this, I've now got my Painter file. This is a pretty nonsensical display of how to use it. Obviously, you can come up with much more creative ideas how to do it. But this shows you the process now for being able to create your own nozzle files. And once you've gone through it two or three times, it's a very fluid procedure to do and hopefully it'll get you into creating lots of different nozzle files.

I know a few years ago I was doing a lot of work where I needed to play with the backgrounds of portraiture, and I often had to lay some grass in there. So I just made a nozzle file where I drew on a bunch of layers different little tufts of sets of grass, and I saved that as my grass file, and then I was able to open that up. And I could instantly go in and start spraying grass into the background. Then ultimately it'd become a painted part of a file. But it was a very quick way to add the texture of grass in an area where I needed it.

So anytime you're working on something that would require a lot of hand labor, you want to stop and think, maybe a nozzle file of a bunch of elements would be a way to do this much quicker than I could ever do if I was drawing something individually by hand. So nozzles and Image Hoses are a very powerful tool that let you express yourself with a mark-making style that you could never do in traditional media. And that's where I'd like to think of this as something it's kind of through the looking glass, and lets us explore and utilize the fact that were in a digital world rather than an analog traditional world.