The main tools of trade when using Quartz Composer are patches. Each of these modular objects has a particular function when plugged together to create flows of information. For example a patch may import or download an image, calculate a mathematical operation, affect an image or function as a switch, selecting between other patches and signals. This flow ends up rendered on screen by a renderer patch.
While you can plug these patches together in almost any way, until recently you could only play with the patches Apple has included in the program by default. You could not create your own. This meant that while QC talks directly to the graphics card and renders all images as OpenGL surfaces, users were limited to rendering onto flat surfaces, spheres, cubes and a teapot shape.
I’ve been playing with rendering onto 3D Studio Max .3ds objects in QC for the past week or so but have had mixed results. The fighter jet model included by ?? works well but most other objects I’ve found online have either crashed QC or rendered incorrectly. I’m sure these issues will be worked out down the track.
Here is a quick demo Quicktime movie showing the fighter jet model in QC with cloud effects generated via particle systems based on this smoke effect by Noise Industries.
_grau is an excellent 10 minute experimental animation directed by Robert Seidel. Lush, fluid images. Stills don’t do it justice. Available in 50 and 150 MB versions.
From the site:
…_grau is a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally. various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds…
Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip for Mac OS X is a handy little application which converts and demuxes mpeg streams. I found it a few weeks ago at work when I needed to recompress a large file from a client to put up on a website. By itself Quicktime Player will only export the video of a muxed mpeg file. MPEG Streamclip is designed specifically to convert mpeg 1 or 2 files to Quicktimes, or split them out to separate video and audio files (mpgs, m2vs, ac3s and aiffs). Very handy and free!
mDimension Technology have developed a plugin for Safari which lets you not only view Quartz Compositions in a web page, but also interact with them via JavaScript. This is very neat!
So far I’ve been experimenting with creating custom applications (Vidgets) in Xcode which control Quartz Compositions, this plugin appears to give me most of the same functionality within a web page. To control and manipulate the composition, first you must follow the same methods of ‘publishing’ inputs and outputs from a composition as described here.
View source on these pages to see how to send and receive information to and from these inputs via JavaScript. I’m still working it out myself!
Here is a demo page from mDimension with a Quartz Composition embedded.
Here is a quick demo I made up based on the above page. It allows you to load an image by entering its url into a field and clicking outside of the field (don’t need to press enter), and change the spinning text similarly.
I’ve been busy working full time and finishing a paper for DAC_05 - Digital Arts & Culture. A conference held in Copenhagen, Denmark in December this year. In 2003 DAC was held here at RMIT in Melbourne. Check out the melbourneDAC site and all the papers.
My paper focusses on the processes of play common to both the creation and use of Vidgets. Rather than looking at my work in terms of its relationship to theatre, literature or cimema (as is often the case when looking at new media art), I draw parallels with the history of sound art practice. In particular I compare the idea of the all data being explored in digital media to the all sound explored by sound artists.
