I'm a Quartz Composer newbie. As part of my education, I am looking at
the example .qtz files, and I am especially interested in music
visualization. The one music visualization example is Club Lisa, a
South Park music visualizer.
What is really strange is, I know from reading various tutorials, I have
to have the visualizer showing in iTunes in order for Club Lisa to
animate the figures, but I also have to specifically have the Lathe,
Jelly or Stix visualizer be the active visualizer in iTunes (9.0.2).
Having either the iTunes classic visualizer or the iTunes visualizer as
the active visualizer kills the character animation in Club Lisa. This
also applies to the default Music Visualizer template; the right
visualizer must be selected in iTunes. But knowing this doesn't help me
understand why this is the case.
But the larger issue is that I'm having trouble figuring out how certain
data is getting into and out of the viewer window.
If you open /Developer/Library/Quartz Composer/Examples/Music
Visualizers/Club Lisa.qtz and then expand the Alessandro Animation,
there does not appear to be anyplace where the figure that appears in
the viewer is being obtained. If you then expand Run and Fists, there
doesn't seem to be any place the running or fists drawings are coming
from or how they are being put out. There are two patches, one called
Hands and one called Run, but they don't seem to be expandable, nor does
the inspector reveal any useful information about them. So how do I
learn from this example to create my own?
Similarly, if I use the template (New From Template > Music Visualizer >
Choose), there are certain inputs that I can't figure out where the
content is coming from.
Root Macro Patch > Audio Spectrum has a macro Interator that has input
parameters "Total Width" and "Individual Width Scale" with a value of
1.544 and 0.5956 respectively. But the inspector has these parameters
greyed out, meaning they are coming from somewhere but I can't change
them. (I note that resizing the viewer or changing the aspect ratio
does not cause them to change, either.) So where are these values
coming from?
I am getting some of this. I was able to combine Club Lisa and the
basic Music Visualizer template into a single visualizer which has Peter
dancing behind the spectrum bars and Alessandro dancing in front of them
(which produces the wierd effect that the floor reflections of the
spectrum bars display in front of Alessandro, even though he is opaque;
guess that shows some compositional limitations of the floor reflection
logic). Interestingly, copying the Audio Spectrum macro from the
template to the combined Club Lisa/template file makes both "Total
Width" and "Individual Width Scale" editable and I can play with their
values.
But as for where the Peter and Alessandro sprites and their moving body
parts are coming from, and why the two input values were locked in the
first place, color me puzzled. Can anyone point this newbie to the
right places (documentation or Finder) to look?
Charles Belov
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