being able to code custom plug-ins is really making quartz composer so much better: not just giving the ability to make different types of ‘teh pretty’, but letting qc’s patching world do what its best at - fiddling with views - and leaving the coordination and control aspects to a dedicated lump of code, like a brain sitting in the middle of the patch.
long story short, this kinetxt installation is seeming like a case study in the object-orientated / model-view-controller way.
having worked through the hillegass cocoa book, its time to start putting that to good use. and project number one was always going to be one of the big glaring omissions in quartz composer to my mind: a means of animating a string on a per-character basis.
if you want to compete with after-effects, then you need to be able to produce the various type animations directors are used to, and you need to do so at a decent framerate. to animate say the entry of a character onto the screen, you would create the animation for one character and then iterate that operation along the string. the problem is, rendering each glyph inside the iterator is both massively expensive and massively redundant, but thats the only approach qc allows, hacks on the back of hacks apart. a much better approach would be to have a single patch that takes a string and produces a data glob of rendered characters and their sizing and spacing information, firing off just once at the beginning and feeding the result to the animation iterator: at which point you’re just moving sprites around and the gpu barely notices.
the patch is released under gplv3, and is attached below.
a massive shout to the kineme duo for leading the way with their custom plug-ins and general all-round heroic qualities. in particular their ‘structure tools’ patches were the enabler for those early text sequencing experiments.
the latest visuals technology development to come off the *spark anvil is a mac-native titler application, made by wrapping a quartz composer patch with some fullscreen code and interface builder bindings. props to roger bolton of quartonian for the guts of the fullscreen xcode project, shared under gpl so expect to see the titler soon once it’s been tidied up.
truly came into its own during the ups and downs of the first day of the festival, where a huge rainfall threatened to wash away half the site. we could upload videos and images taken moments before, and pun the titles out till they got beyond baaaaaaaad. ‘shave yourself’ still my favourite.
its a strange day when you look at what you and your lady are reading for fun… and find they’re both developers books. suffice to say, programming in objective-c isn’t quite as much fun as the developer’s bible, but then again when the summer has included bulgakov’s the master and margarita nothing can quite compare… satan kicking up a ruckus in atheist 1930’s moscow. with a talking, cigar smoking black cat. and historical passages involving pontius pilate.
