A lot has happened since Jitter Recipes: Book Three. Max 6 came along, and brought with it a wealth of new tools for making some really fine Jitter work. With a full physics engine, support for complex scene hierarchies, advanced animation tools, it has taken me some time to catch my breath and get caught up. And don’t get me started on Gen! Now I’ve emerged from the Jitter Test Kitchen to give you a new series of recipes that will help you get caught up too.
Below you will find the fourth installment of Jitter Recipe Collection. More snacks for the Patching Enthusiast! Stay tuned for more entries to your favorite cookbook.
Recipe 44: ScrollyBrush
General Principles
- Using jit.mgraphics to create a nice airbrush effect
- Combining graphics with compositing/feedback
- Using jit.pix for some basic image compositing
Commentary
I thought it would be fun to come up with a drawing tool that moved as you draw, automatically creating tile-ready images. Combining some really basic MGraphics techniques with feedback and image offset makes for a super fun drawing patch. Start scrolling.
Ingredients
- jit.mgraphics
- jit.pix
- jit.matrix
Technique
We’ll start with creating our brush shape. To do this, the mouse coordinates from jit.pwindow are packed together and formatted to create a simple radial gradient in the correct location. Walking through that big message box, we paint the background white, create our gradient, create an ellipse vector shape, set the fill source to our gradient, and then fill the ellipse. You can see the result in the small jit.pwindow on the left.
To accumulate our brush strokes, we have a named Jitter Matrix “blip” that is composited with the brush shape for each frame.
The really tricky things are happening inside of the jit.pix object. You’ll notice that the jit.mgraphics output is actually black and white, but the image we create is in full color. The red-channel of the brush image is taken and used to mix the accumulated image with a defined color (bcolor). Another way to think of it is that the brush image is the alpha channel in the compositing between the image and the color.
Finally, the scroll is done by adding to the coordinates used by the ‘nearest’ operator. If I had used ‘sample’, the image would look streaky before long, and wouldn’t have that endless scroll effect I wanted. ‘Nearest’ will always take the nearest sample from the incoming matrix instead of interpolating.
Thanks. This is just what I have been looking for. But, how would I go about changing the ScrollyBrush, so that it does not scroll. The same features, but no scrolling downwards? Some pointers would be great. I am kind of new to Jitter.
Awesome! This is great!
Hi Ricardo. The scroll is controlled by the offset param. You can set it to 0 if you don’t want it to scroll. You can also just delete the ‘nearest’ part of the jit.pix patch and connect “in 2″ directly to the first inlet of “mix”.
[...] Jitter Recipe Books by Andrew Benson: A great set of “simple” Max patches for advanced video applications; excellent tutorials for advanced Jitter work. [...]
This is great! The thing that mistified me was how to get a continuous line when setting the brush size smaller in Recipe 44?
Setting the brush size smaller leaves a lot of ‘holes’ between’ points, upping the metro doesn’t seem to fix it. What is a solution to this?
thanks, M
Hi Maarten,
Try using much smaller offset values and don’t move the mouse so fast. Smaller brushes cover less area, so it’s harder to maintain a smooth line.
getting the following error on recipe 48
”
gen_domain: jit.gen: [string "gen1.jit.cpp1"]:431: assertion failed!
jit_gen: Gen patcher not compiled
”
excited to get it working!
Sounds like you are probably using an older Max 6 version. Try updating and see if that clears it up.
Hi! and Thank you!
I get the msg from hit.anim.node “doesn’t understand “anchor”"
Any suggestions ? again, Thank you
We are trying to use a different input method other than a mouse and we are new to using Max Start. Our project is due on friday so PLEASE HELP ASAP :(
@Francisco @anchor was added in an update to Max 6. You might need to upgrade to the most recent available version on the site.
@K and E, The [route mouse] in ScrollyBrush can be replaced with anything that outputs a list of 2 values in a similar range (0-299) if you’d like different inputs to drive brush position
Thank you so much for the patch.
However, I couldn’t seem to find which object is triggering the particle burst. I am trying to sync the burst effect to the beat of the audio signal.
Hi Andrew,
First thanks for your work and contributions!
I want to study your patch deeply because I want to create a similar drawing application but instead of drawing with an airbrush effect I want to do some watercolor realtime drawing.
I’ve found an interesting paper about watercolor simulation on http://grail.cs.washington.edu/pub/papers/curtis-1997-cgw.pdf
How can I start to translating the paper pseudocode into Max? I’m able to code in C++ but I don’t know how to do it using Max objects.
Is possible to open / code in Max without objects and patch cords and do it like other languages but using the Max Runtime?
Any consideration before starting the project?
Is there any better or easy aproach to achieve a watercolor simulation in Max (maybe using OpenGL shaders, Procedural shape growth, etc)?.
I’m quite new to Max environment so sorry if this is a stupid question.
In the other hand, I’ve opened your patch but I can’t get it work!
I’ve downloaded latest Max version 6.1.2 and when I open the patch I get the following errors:
clang: error line 3024 column 10: no matching function for call to "rgb_to_rgba" jit_gen: Gen patcher not compiled
Why if I get other Gen patches running?
How I can debug the clang error? I’m used to debug apps but I don’t know how to “see” inline code (I’ve only worked in Max with patcher window).
Thanks a lot,
Adrian.
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