Pd, aka Pure Data, is the free and open-source cousin of Max/MSP/Jitter. It’s powerful — even sometimes having technical advantages over Max — but has suffered from complex installation and dependencies, poor documentation, and an unpolished interface. Enter Pd-extended, a distribution that fills in those gaps. Pd-extended’s maintainer Hans-Christoph writes up what this is all about in an introduction on Create Digital Music, friendly even if you’re new to the Pd world.

Pd, Max’s Free Cousin, Gets Polish and Ease in Extended Build

Visualists should be especially interested in this latest release, because it offers much-improved out-of-the-box support for custom-patched 3D and video — especially if you’re on a Mac, for the PiDiP (though there are Windows and Linux improvements, too, and GEM works even with Windows).

Mac OS improvements:

• Image and video-processing PDP/PiDiP work out-of-box
• Anti-aliasing of boxes and lines in the interface
• New, purty icon

Linux:

• A .deb package for Debian and Ubuntu, with GNOME menu support. (`Bout time! Wonder if this means we’ll see it in the big Ubuntu repositories?)
• New icon

All platforms:

• GEM, the quasi-Jitter-like 3D and pixel library, has working shader support. Ed.: Truly outrageous.
• New libraries: mapping, msd, mrpeach net/OSC, flib
• [comport] is robust on all platforms (can you say Arduino?)
• Font-face and -font-weight command line options
• New font and layout is the exact same size on all platforms to the pixel. (previously you’d see some serious cross-platform glitching)

Pd Extended Release

And lest you have a bad taste in your mouth from the fugly older releases of Pd, Anton (vade) sends along the picture at the top of this story, showing the new UI from the Pd 0.40 dailies running on Mac OS X. Anton is also working on porting some of his brilliant visual patching from Max to Pd — and he’s living proof that even a Max die-hard can find at least some use with Pd, too. (The two environments are really, really close — sometimes confusion switching between them is because they’re so close, the differences can be confusing.)

Audio, relying primarily on the CPU, can do fine on the non-pro MacBook: a fast CPU and FireWire 400 can be all you need. But for visualists, the GPU has become more and more vital. The integrated Intel GPU on the MacBooks is surprisingly capable, and certainly gets through basic video mixing. But throw enough shaders at it (even just processing video, without any 3D modeling or gaming), and it can’t keep up. That’s the reason Apple requires the MacBook Pro for Final Cut Studio; with Motion, at least, they’re absolutely right.

You’d be wise to postpone a MacBook Pro purchase over recent months, though, with Intel’s new Santa Rosa architecture coming and NVIDIA working on taking their 8000-series GPUs mobile. Apple today announced they’ve got the new machines with both — and better displays, too.

MacBook Pro [Apple]

For more on the music and CPU side of this, see our sister site, Create Digital Music:
MacBook Pro Revision: Big Santa Rosa Performance Boost, 4GB RAM Option, More

The short version: better displays, finally a 1920px option, the latest-and-greatest NVIDIA GPU for faster performance in Motion and OpenGL goodness for geeks, faster CPUs, more RAM — just generally fewer ways your wallet can avoid buying one of these silver surfers. I got some additional performance details from Apple, and hope to follow up with my own benchmarks.

Shaders, snippets of code for processing pixels and 3D points on your 3D card’s GPU, are cool — that much you may know. You may even know that you can use shaders — designed for 3D applications — to perform powerful video-processing tricks, as well, at high speeds, even on a relatively lowly laptop. How to actually build your own — that may be elusive. So, at long last, Cycling ‘74 has published a great, beginner-friendly (even for non-programmers) tutorial on building your own shaders:

Your First Shader

The author is Andrew Benson, who is my hero as far as coming up with great Jitter examples. (Every time I’m looking for some model for a technique I have in mind, I keep stumbling on his sample patches in the Jitter folder and still more in his By the second page, you’re already building your own custom, glitchy visual filters. Great stuff.

Now, of course, this tutorial isn’t limited to users of Max/MSP/Jitter, but Max is really an ideal environment for testing shaders. (It can even work well as a prototype environment before going elsewhere.) This code will work in Processing, though, and I could see using a combination of those two tools (still working on my own workflow there).

We’ll be practicing our shader chops, because there’s definitely a need for more information like this. This sentence says it all: “If you want to learn more, I highly recommend poking around the “jitter-shaders” folder and grabbing the official GLSL specification(PDF) or the GLSL Orange Book.” Good advice, and the example Jitter shaders included with the program will already do a lot of what you’d like need. But, as fair warning, the Orange Book and other official OpenGL documentation can make your head hurt, fast. (There’s a reason “… for Dummies” isn’t on the end of the title.) I still recommend picking up a copy, but there’s definitely a need for at least intermediate documentation. Being something of a dummy myself, I may be able to help.

For custom 3D work or GPU-native processing of images and videos, a working knowledge of coding shaders is essential. Custom shaders are widely supported in tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing (with some work), Java coding, Pd/GEM, Quartz Composer, and even many other video and 3D apps. In Jitter, for instance, you can basically add some custom shader code to an existing patch without any other coding.

Getting started, though, isn’t an easy task. There’s the “orange book”, the complete OpenGL shader reference linked below. It’s worth owning, but trying to decipher it as a beginner is a little like trying to figure out how to build a car from an automaker trade journal when you don’t know how to change your oil. You really don’t have to be a hard-core programmer to do this, but you do need somewhere to begin.

TyphoonLabs Shader Designer is a free IDE for creating your own vertex and pixel/fragment shaders, the magical code snippets that process 3D geometries, textures, and even images and video on your GPU. I’ve been fiddling around with it a bit on Windows as I work on learning OpenGL’s shading language, GLSL, and it seems quite handy. Previously Windows-only, it’s now available on Linux, as well. (It was developed with .NET, which is getting increasingly nice OpenGL tools of its own.)

TyphoonLabs Shader Designer

With code completion and syntax highlighting, easy access to settings, and real-time previews, this could be just the tool for someone learning about shaders for use in other software, like Max/MSP/Jitter.

If you’re on the Mac and want something similar, make sure you’ve installed the developer tools from the OS X 10.4 disc, and check out the 3D folders. There’s a similar tool for working with shaders included in the OS X distribution.

We hope to have more shader coverage through 2006, so hold onto your seats for some newbie-friendly shader tutorials. (I.e., if we can do it, you can do it.)

Via OpenGL.org’s news blog, an excellent source for all the latest OpenGL geekery.

One major carrot Microsoft is holding out to convince people to upgrade to Vista some time next year is the broadly-overhauled DirectX 10. I’m skeptical about many of the new features in Vista, but I have to say, DirectX 10 is tempting, at least based on what we know now. Details are somewhat sketchy, but it sounds like Microsoft has done a lot of work to overhaul the 3D graphics API in Windows. The best information so far has come from ExtremeTech:

DirectX 10 interview [ExtremeTech podcasts]

More details emerge about DirectX 10 [Ars Technica; primarily analysis of ExtremeTech's interview]

Two revelations come out of this podcast: first, someone at Microsoft or ExtremeTech knows jack about audio fidelity. (A little bad? It sounds like you were talking via a satellite phone. To Mars.) Second, DirectX 10 will have plenty to offer. Here’s where we’re really lucky: those of us using 3D for interactive art don’t have to worry about the issues game developers have to worry about. We don’t have to wait for customers to upgrade to new graphics cards and Vista software, because we can do that whenever we want. DirectX 10 promises some really fantastic eye candy and capabilities, and many of these you’ll be able to take advantage of soon — some, even before DirectX 10 and Vista become available to the public. Here’s why your eyes should care.