Hybrid Visuals

Shaping the Random || Quartz Composer and other generative experiments

 

VDMX mouse macro

July 26th, 2010

///EDIT: With the arrival of VDMX b8, you can directly forward mouse events from a preview window in VDMX to Quartz Composer. So no need to use this little macro anymore. I’ll leave it here for prosperity’s sake, but like any good technology, it’s become obsolete ;-) Tutorial here: vimeo.com/​20222913

I’ve been doing a lot of live drawing and other visuals that require X and Y inputs lately. VDMX has the wonderful feature that you can publish a structure input from your Quartz Composer path with ‘xy’ in front of the name. It will then show up as an interface element with x and y sliders and a 2d point picker. To make it even better, you can sync these to the mouse in a preview window, allowing you to draw inside the interface without having your mouse on the second output!

2d point picker example

The downside is that the xy-input shows up as a structure in the 0…1 range, and QC needs different coordinates. So to save myself some time, I’ve made a macro that handles all the structure splitting and math interpolation. The whole thing is dynamic, and will give correct coordinates no matter what aspect ratio you’re working on, making it ideal for triplehead setups.

Download here and then place inside in ~yourhomefolder/Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Quartz Composer/Clips on Leopard or ~/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches on Snow Leopard.

Hope it’s useful to someone!

 
5 Comments | Posted in Downloads, tagged: ,

5 Responses to “VDMX mouse macro” (post new)

  1. rybotron
    July 28th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
     

    It is very useful, thanks! I grabbed your math patch with the translation equation a while back and have been using a bunch. This is just an cool addition on top of that.

  2. Hybrid Visuals » Archive » Quartz Composer tutorial #7: Awesome Line Drawer
    August 10th, 2010 at 1:44 am
     

    [...] You’ll need the following plugins and macros: kineme.net/QuartzComposerPatches/StructureTools/0.1 kineme.net/release/AlphaBlendMode/10 kineme.net/release/GLTools/16 hybridvisuals.nl/downloads/vdmx-mouse-macro/ [...]

  3. bitbopper
    October 13th, 2010 at 1:45 am
     

    Thanks, it was really useful and learn a lot.. thanks.

  4. ejclark
    August 29th, 2011 at 5:14 pm
     

    It also works very well with the Quartz Composer Plugin qcOSC.plugin at http://hexler.net/software/qcosc for translating the XY pad of the TouchOSC app for the iPhone and iPad at http://hexler.net/software/touchosc . Although I did have to reverse the Y output using the Math patch with “value x -1″.
    Thanks for making it available.

  5. joris
    August 29th, 2011 at 10:55 pm
     

    Glad you found it useful. I sort of figured it’d be obsolete after VDMX 8 came out, but turns out being too lazy to take it down was helpful to someone after all ;-)

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