Hybrid Visuals

Shaping the Random || Quartz Composer and other generative experiments

VDMX mouse macro

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!

 

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

  1.  

    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.  

    [...] 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/ [...]

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