I have been playing around rather heavily with max/msp for the sound applet hand-in in a few days. Having focused a lot on sound for the games module, i decided to focus on video, and using jitter. Jitter basically deals with video, 3d and matrixes. I have found it to be thoroughly confusing and complex yet i can really see the power of the jitter objects available.
As always with Max, if what your trying to do isn’t covered in a tutorial, then your basically left to fumble around aimlessly scrolling through help files and patches to find that one object that might help you out of the deadlock. Im not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, certainly in Max/MSP it allows you to explore new objects and i learn’t many things from clicking on the ’see also’ drop down in help patchers.
However, with jitter it is a darn site more confusing. Thankfully cycling74 came to my rescue when i discovered the Jitter Recipes. I had previously spent some time mapping webcam feeds to 3d objects, but i wanted something much more dynamic. Example 12 of the Jitter Recipes book 1 was my saviour, as it demonstrated how to distort textures and video images using OpenGL processing.
I took the thing to pieces and rebuilt it, trying to understand what it did. The maths equations were a little scary, and i found that i didn’t need to tweak or fiddle with them all that much, as above with the texture distorter.
Next i want to implement the use of a microphone input to distort the the live video feed. I am having to work on a Mac as the jit.dx.grab for the webcam feed does not seem to work all that well. Macs use jit.qt.grab (quicktime) which appears to be more robust and compatible with the creation of vertices and the distorting of the textures.
Tags: idat305