Computer software is routinely used to create and/or modify graphic images on a computer display. Graphics software that is meant to run in conjunction with a graphical user interface-based operating system, such as Microsoft Windows NT, must be able to make use of the graphics capabilities of the operating system, i.e. the software must understand about brushes, pens, colors etc. Special graphics processors and higher speed general purpose processors used in conjunction with graphics software and large, high resolution monitors have improved the ability to display graphics and text images on a computer screen.
Graphics software packages are commercially available from a number of software vendors that run on various hardware configurations. The availability of reduced cost, more powerful processors has allowed paint and 3-D modelling systems to be made available for use on personal computers and high-speed workstations. A typical use of such software running on such a configuration of hardware is for video editing and computer animation.
Prior art graphics software is commercially available from SOFTIMAGE of Montreal, Canada. This software includes a paint capability wherein the user can define a brush that will be used in rendering images on the computer display. As with most computer graphics programs, existing graphics computer programs can also display text using a particular style of text where the style includes the font of the text as well as the size, color etc.
In the film, tension and multimedia industry, post production is normally carried out using several different editing and mixing equipment and facilities, including different computer-based animation and editing systems. Post production usually involves a wide range of processes on a wide range of data types, each of which can be affected or composed of a number of elements and/or properties. These data types, elements and properties vary greatly between toolsets. For example, audio data can receive audio effects, which deal with time and audio samples. In contrast, a body of text in a titling system can be assigned a font and channel mask, which ignores time and deals with a static image.
Simply describing the diversity of data types using a common language is a problem. As a result, graphics software such as prior art post production systems could not deal with such a variety of data types with a consistent user interface (UI). Separate systems and equipment were commonly used to handle the different data types.
Even if a suitable scheme (or taxonomy) for dealing with each of the various data types is developed, maintaining user interface consistency when dealing with these types remains a challenge. Ideally, the user interface should be consistent for all data and elements, efficient for use by very skilled "power" users, and extensible to handle new data types as the product and/or needs evolve.
These problems and needs apply to a wide variety of systems, including video post production systems and other complex environments and, as mentioned above, conventional user interfaces for such systems are often not fast enough for most power users. Specifically, a user often requires the ability to quickly select from a broad palette elements which include tools, properties and other settings. For instance if a user is animating a character, certain paint attributes which recreate objects such as hair, skin, etc., will be used repetitively. It is unacceptable to many users to be required to repeatedly make multiple selections, usually by multiple key presses mouse events, each time a tool or setting is to be accessed or employed.
Further, when using prior art graphics software and similar systems, it was not possible to easily save all the properties that are combined to define items such as brush strokes, text rendering or the like. For example, in order to produce a stroke or character with a particular or specific look, a paint or titling artist or other user can set up many individual parameters to achieve the desired result. For example, the user can define a specific brush shape, size, profile, specific color, opacity, tool shape etc. Once the properties for a parameter or tool have been set up, prior art software only allowed the user to save and retrieve some subsets of the discrete settings or parameters which were combined to achieve the desired result and thus the user would have to recreate the balance of the combination as best they could. Further, while some prior art graphics software does allow a user to save a brush by itself, or to create and save some combinations of parameters for very specific effects, none have allowed the user to save all the elements which uniquely define the appearance of each stroke, text element or other item.