eMotion - Basic particles tool example from Adrien Mondot on Vimeo.

We saw eMotion last year — it’s a Mac OS-based 3D tool for particles and visual effects, with physics modeling, Wacom tablet control, input from sensors and OpenSoundControl, a text engine, and integrated Quartz Composer support. In other words: it’s a friendly tool for making pretty motion imagery, designed to be usable by performers.

Creator Adrien Mondot has new videos up and a beta available for download. (An Intel Mac running Leopard is required.)

eMotion on stage from eMotion for Animation on Vimeo.

More videos, including screencasts on features like forces and Quartz Composer:

Vimeo screencasts

Details on the software and a download link:

eMotion

The description is a bit hyperbolic ("a new way to define movement"?) given that a lot of this is indebted to 1970s "augmented reality" research by Myron Krueger and physics simulations by, well, a lot of people. (Particle systems were specifically invented by Bill Reeves of Pixar in the early 80s. Ahem — Khaaaaaaaaaan!) I don’t think that takes away from the coolness of this — on the contrary, I think acknowledging historical lineage helps demonstrate why the new, accessible, personal rendition of that is valuable. But there is a lot here that’s done very well. It’ll be fantastic to watch it develop.

Likewise, it’s interesting to see these tools (and vvvv, also mentioned today) working with proprietary, platform-specific technologies. There are certainly some advantages to hooking into the Mac’s Core Image and other app development tools (see Quartz Composer, VDMX, etc.), or Windows’ DirectX (as with vvvv). I think the challenge for people interested in open, cross-platform development is to make things just as usable and visually consistent with OpenGL and cross-platform APIs.

Adrien Mondot has posted a preview of his latest creation for OS X - eMotion. eMotion is an physically modeled, OpenGL powered particle engine enabled app that is Quartz Composer friendly, has an incredible text engine, and has Wii remote, wacom tablet, OSC and sudden motion sensor inputs to drive parameters. Watch the video to see for yourself, the text effects are quite amazing.

Unfortunately no public beta is currently available. You can check out Adriens other Quartz Composer and OpenGL related projects (with downloads and source) on his blog. Be sure to check out the “Simple Time Remap” application, it seems like the smoothest video scratching tool Ive come across.

eMotion looks to be an incredibly powerful and smooth addition to any VJ setup, especially with its Quartz Composer integration and text-savvy nature. This is one to keep an eye on. We’ll try and get you more details on eMotion, but for now you can lust after its mysterious ways and watch that video.

Here’s a video roundup for you fans of Quartz Composer, the powerful, free live motion graphics synthesizer and developer tool on Mac OS X 10.4 and later. Korg KAOSS Pad 3s and game controllers prove again to be very cool controllers for visual performance. If you’re not a QC user, these will work well with other custom visual apps, too (Jitter, Pd/GEM, vvvv, Processing, etc.).

Korg KAOSS Pad as Live Visual Controller

Via Matrixsynth, the new Korg KAOSS Pad 3 proves to be a truly powerful tool for manipulating live visuals. As opposed to previous KAOSS Pads, which had only an undifferentiated X/Y pad, the KP3 has LED feedback that allows you to create custom grid interfaces. This gets put to powerful effect by mapping MIDI input to custom synthesized 3D visualization patches in Quartz Composer, courtesy YouTube user porchka66. Assuming you’ve got a Mac to run it (mini for six hundred bucks, perhaps?), you’ve got a powerful custom visual synthesizer with more flexibility than pricey options like the Edirol CG-8, at a tiny fraction of the price. If you don’t like the look of the visuals here, incidentally, you can patch your custom visuals to look like whatever you want (something that’s harder with closed-box hardware).

Game Controller as Visual Controller / Synth

Too poor to buy a KP3? Use a cheap game controller instead. That’s what our friend Surya Buchwald did in a recent experiment, courtesy the lovely game controller-to-MIDI utility on Mac, Junxion:

A/V Synth Controlled by Gamepad [The Lava Flow]

Simple results so far, but this should give you other ideas. I really like the synesthesia going here, with the patch acting both as visual and sonic synthesizer.

I’m surprised there aren’t more game controllers out there in performances; they’re cheap, there’s a wide variety of designs, and they’re reasonably easy to configure for use with Macs and PCs. (Xbox 360 controllers now work on PCs, too, and I expect might be adapted to Mac use, as well. PS/2 and GameCube controllers can be used with cheap USB adapters on any platform.) The results, again, can be anything you want them to be.

Quartz Composer Meets After Effects

In a combination you don’t often encounter, After Effects and Quartz Composer both got applied to this music video production, by Tim Jaeger (also on The Lava Blog; thanks for the correction). I love the minimalist, graphic look, with QC visuals evidently generated dynamically by the music:

Music video made with Quartz Composer, After Effects [The Lava Flow]

Got a favorite use for Quartz Composer? Upload some video and let us know about it!

So, you’ve got some nifty visualizations patched in Apple’s Quartz Composer, and something clever using video mapping in Processing: now combine them. Our friend Steve Cooley writes to say that he’s figured out a way to do just that, starting with a Processing sketch he originally programmed for live video. Thanks to Quartz Composer’s integration with QuickTime (QC patches run inside QT 7 video clips), and Processing’s support for QuickTime, you embed the QC patch as a video clip. Anything that plays back in QuickTime player should play back within Processing. (Note that that doesn’t give you the full interactivity and I/O of Quartz Composer, but as can be seen in the example below, it can create some very compelling effects, particularly as you use both these tools for quick sketches, prototyping, and visual improvisations.)

(As Steve points out, if you want to save videos of your work like this one, check out our friend Daniel Shiffman’s excellent MovieMaker library for Processing.)

Full details and the original Processing sketch and Quartz Composer composition at Steve’s blog:

Quartz Composer inside of Processing [Steve Cooley Fine Art]

No source code, but you don’t need it: just point at the .mov file exported from your QC composition. Needless to say, this is Mac only, and requires 10.4 and QT 7.

When Apple released the free visual synthesizer tool Quartz Composer as part of Mac OS X 10.4, they hoped developers would take it up and create gorgeous eye candy. Keith Lang, part of the plasq team that created hit Mac software like Comic Life, has done just that with a new set of screensavers and visualizers for plasq’s audio software Rax. The lessons he learned in QC could be useful to anyone using the software, whether you’re a developer or building a live art installation or VJ set. -PK

We here at plasq recently released ’sqreensavers’ - a set of 10 screensavers based on the visualizers in our Rax 2.0 Audio Unit Host. I’m proud to say that in the short period since release the set has been downloaded over 20,000 times.

sqreensavers @ plasq.com
Rax audio app @ Create Digital Music

The good people at CDM asked me, as the Quartz Composer guy behind these, to share my experiences in working with QC.

Quartz Composer is an amazing bit of (now) Apple technology - it allows some really complex and artistic results from only a reasonable amount of effort. It’s free, and it’s also supported really well on the Mac platform - any machine running 10.4 can open a Quartz Composition within QuickTime. Finder also previews Quartz Compositions, and it’s also a breeze to incorporate into applications. There’s no support for it on the Windows platform.

QC, (as I’ll abbreviate it) is an application where you can connect many modules together to create a real time visual output, which can be exported as a QuickTime Movie, turned into a screensaver,
integrated into applications, or shared with mac users. Lots more info is on the net.

My personal experiences:

Quartz Composer, the free Mac developer and live visual tool, can be daunting to beginners. Its modular synthesis approach to manipulating live visuals is powerful, but is open-ended enough that it can be hard to know where to begin. And some of its real power — like the ability to create highly-optimized custom image and video processing that runs on your graphics card — is largely undocumented.

Fortunately, over a year after QC’s release as part of OS X 10.4, a growing community of users has been sharing its secrets. If you want to follow along with some of my unstructured notes for the class I’m teaching at Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward gallery, please come visit our blog and be an honorary, “out-of-Brooklyn” student:

Quartz Composer Journal

I’ll have more structured resources, and eventually a full tutorial, here on Create Digital Motion soon. In the meantime, though, you can enjoy Windell’s video feedback tutorial, which unlocks some of the mysteries of the Core Image Accumulator — and makes a Mac-loving cat a star. And let us know if you have example QC patches — or questions/problems, for that matter.

I’ll be teaching a new course, based on Mac interactive tech and featuring Apple’s free developer tool Quartz Composer, at the new 3rd Ward space in Brooklyn (East Williamsburg aka Bushwick). 3rd Ward is an enormous “workspace and studio facility for artists & creative professionals”: think the artist equivalent of a gym membership plus enormous studio and fabrication space of a scale we rarely see in New York.

The idea of the course is to offer artists a solid grounding in interactive design and responsive visuals and projection, even for those who have no previous experience. My belief is that artists from traditional media often get denied the opportunity to experiment with new technologies, leaving them instead for the “digital people.” So, I’ve also chosen to teach free tools, which make for an easier investment, and also don’t require you to make a commitment early on to a single tool that might not be best for you. You can also expect lots of hands-on experimentation with visuals, video, projectors, sensors, and sound inputs, because that’s the kinda person I am and 3rd Ward actually has space!

If you or anyone you know in the New York area is thinking of registering, feel free to get in touch. But don’t fret if not: I want to give something back to the awesome Quartz Composer and Mac community, so I’ll be posting examples and class notes here on Create Digital Motion to share with everyone and get feedback.

Elements of Interactive Art: A Creative, Mac-Based Introduction
Instructor: Peter Kirn
Location: Digital Media Lab
Tuesdays and Thursdays - August 24 through September 12
Time: 7p-9p
$390 members/$485 non-members
Register / more information via the Digital Media classes page at 3rd Ward

Updated: In cooperation with 3rd Ward, I’m able to offer a discount: Workshop and Studio Discount in Brooklyn for Create Digital Motion Readers