Quartz composer questions?

[Kolourspace]

Hi,
I've been doing some of the QC tutorials and really like how this software works. I can see its obviously pretty good for quite a range range of content creation, but I was wondering about a couple of other uses:

1. Can I use it to do the typical 'lines around boxes' thing that you can do in After Effects? How do I get the image of my set up (boxes/windows etc.) into QC and get the lines to draw around the edges?

2. Does it have a Syphon thing so I can use it directly with etc?

Thanks for any advice,
Kol

[vade]

Yes, if you searched the syphon home page you will see we have a QC Plugin.

Ask QC Questions on the Quartz Composer Mailing list at lists.apple.com, or on Kineme.net.

What is this "lines around boxes" thing?

[seriouscyrus]

1. I think you mean perspective quads/quad warps? There are several ways to do it in QC, you can find the code, or there are plugins from kineme and 1024, these are what allows you to map images to surfaces. I think the "lines around boxes" is a tracing effect around the edges?, that would be a seperate image animation you feed to your quads. I'm not sure about lining up your image? I always do this by hand.

QC is very much a blank slate, it's possible of many things, but pretty much have to figure out to do much of it yourself.

I've done my own basic projection mapper in it, I knew what I wanted to do, but didn't want to fork out for something like mad mapper, and I found the existing free tools, ermmm, not so great. it was a good project to learn a lot of QC.

[Kolourspace]

Originally Posted by vade

What is this "lines around boxes" thing?

Projection Mapping - YouTube

Projection Mapping - YouTube

The sort of thing that's happening from around 0:55 in this video

[vanakaru]

You really need to start reading

createdigitalmotion.com;
creativecow.com

and experimenting with the model you made and a projector. You did build your stage model already, did you not?

[ShaKinDa]

for all quartz composer questions and some new learning and free files check out iloveqc.org its the companion site for the new quartz composer book surya and i wrote, more info on it too there and a discount link

[mr_coops]

Shakinda, I may be being daft but on the registration screen where you put in your details it appears that the register button doesn't work...

[seriouscyrus]

Originally Posted by Kolourspace

Projection Mapping - YouTube

The sort of thing that's happening from around 0:55 in this video

You can do that in QC, like many things in QC, you just need to figure out how.

[Kolourspace]

Originally Posted by seriouscyrus

You can do that in QC, like many things in QC, you just need to figure out how.

Ok, done loads of tutorials and lots of reading, still can't work out how to do what I think is probably not too complicated. I can do it easily with AFX, but still no joy with QC.

Any pointers to compositions which I can download like this would be great.

Out of interest, has anyone bought the book from IloveQC? Is it a good read?

Thanks.

[vanakaru]

I would do it with AE and would not mess with QC at all unless you projection structure is changing and you need to accommodate on the fly.