Quartz Composer/VDMX tutorial no 1: The bouncing ball from goto10 on Vimeo.

Trying to learn Apple’s free visual patching tool Quartz Composer, useful for making your own filters and simple generative effects?

Or perhaps you’re learning VDMX, the brilliant, semi-modular Mac-friendly visual tool – which also happens to host Quartz Composer compositions as effects or generative sources?

Well, good news for you: readers have a ton of tutorials for both, thanks to some intrepid readers in comments on that fantastic-looking CONTAKT/Richie Hawtin show.

First up, Joris de Jong aka Hybrid Visuals has started a series of tutorials on VDMX and Quartz Composer – two delicious tastes put together. And he points us at some other useful tutorials, too. Some of my favorites:

Possibly the most perplexing concept to wrap your head around in Quartz Composer is the iterator. Iteration in code is pretty straightforward (think “for” loops), but while it’s powerful in a patch, it’s conceptually a bit of a challenge. So it’s great to see Kineme (makers of great QC plug-ins) making sense of it in this tutorial:


Tutorial on Iterators from Christopher Wright on Vimeo.

Shakinda has a look at getting your visuals grooving to the music:


The Irishman’s Guide To Quartz Composer :: Lesson 3 :: LFO and Interpolation from shakinda on Vimeo.

If you just want a starter look at VDMX, check out aeinn’s complete guide, although it’s about time for a beta 7 guide!

Also via comments: Rolin of DecollageTV has put together a terrific list of links in his del.icio.us bookmarks (which I have to admit I hadn’t seen since their redesign – quite nice!)

http://delicious.com/decollagetv/quartzcomposer

Got more favorites? Vimeo channels? Other tutorials? Let us know!

5 responses to “VDMX + Quartz Composer, in Free Video Tutorials”

  1. Torley says:

    Great to see video tutorials for this — it makes sense, teaching about visuals with visuals. 🙂

    While not strictly generative visuals, some of the finest co-packaged video tutorials + special effects products I've seen are @ http://videocopilot.net The last mention they got on here was in 2006 but they've kept getting better!

    I'd like to see more videos showing how hardware controllers can affect what's happening on-screen: on more than one occasion, this has been a difficult concept to explain to a budding visualist, but upon showing a video, they go WOW!

    On a tangent but has a "WOW!" factor… Peter, have you seen http://www.revisionfx.com/products/twixtor/

    ^ Looks like its elastic time is one of those often-used but seldom-explained Hollywood effects.

  2. […] former British Empire subjects). Visualist and Quartz Composer guru Shakinda (as seen previously in free tutorials here) was there, and reports back: Last weekend I was over performing and giving a quartz composer […]

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