Walt Disney Head

emanuel lopes's picture

Hi!

I made a Screensaver and iTunes Visualizer using a model of Walt Disney's head by David O'Reilly.

I also used George Toledo's Open CL Morph and Kineme Audio Tools.

Check it out here: http://emanuelopes.com/post/19695532644/walt-disney-screensaver

cybero's picture
Re: Walt Disney Head

Feedback and Advice.

I really like the Screensaver Speak to my Voice facility. Would have liked to see the Disney head rotating - simple Interpolation set to 180 with a real slow Duration on Loop.

On Lion and possibly on Snow Leopard too, you need to publish up the Colour input from the Mesh to Root so that it can be configured to suit the needs of the end user. I would suggest a default of 50 % to begin with.

It might not be a bad idea to consider that not everyone has Kineme Audio Tools installed, thus the Screensaver will lose some functionality on a lot of people's systems.

[Just noticed that you do install the Audio Tools - is that AOK? Guess so as it is now Open Sourced - brave and bold decision by Kineme / Kosada. Or to put it another way is it AOK without including the following somehow in your Installer.pkg - even a simple text file would suffice I'd have thought.

Copyright (c) 2011 Kosada, Inc.
 
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), 
to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, 
and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
 
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
 
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF 
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE 
FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION 
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Just a thought]

You could use the 3d Sound Player - it's a stock patch - instead of Audio Tools. Question to Kineme crew - won't most end users need to enable the Audio Tools for their environment, or am I slow on picking up on something here?

Having an Instructions Macro [Help Display] might be useful too.

Given the current reliance upon Plugins for these compositions, these would work quite nicely as Quartz Builder applications.

I also think that being able to stop Disney from talking in the Screensaver could be useful; having a multiplex of different audio extracts might be quite entertaining.

To avoid disappointment I'd recommend that you state the OS and Plugin requirements upon your download page.

When the Visualizer is viewed in Full Screen mode in iTunes, the Track Info is obscured by the giant Disney head.

Come to think of it though there's another little problem with this distribution - which does work quite nicely in Quartz Composer and love those Vimeo videos Emanuel BTW.

That problem is to do with perfectly invalid installer paths.

The following are invalid install paths

/Users/Shared/LANrevInstallEase_FilesForHomeDirectory/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches/AudioTools.plugin
/Users/Shared/LANrevInstallEase_FilesForHomeDirectory/Library/Compositions/Walt's Singing Head.qtz
/Users/Shared/LANrevInstallEase_FilesForHomeDirectory/Library/Screen Savers/Walt's Screensaver.qtz

Composition Repository does not understand LANrevInstallEase_FilesForHomeDirectory.

Just being constructively critical, hope you understand.

emanuel lopes's picture
Re: Walt Disney Head

Thank you for your comments. I will follow some of your advice right away, such as including the text in the installer package.

When you say that the install paths are invalid, is it true for both the installer and the uninstaller? I just noticed that the uninstaller seems not to be working but the installer works fine.

It is the first time I create an installer file, I hope you understand :)

cybero's picture
Re: Walt Disney Head

Looking at your statement, 'will follow some of your advice', I thought it would be good to manually deinstall the items and try reinstalling them again.

Initially the installer installed to the file paths I quoted to you, although this time around, the Shared folder was merely a temporary resting place and the items did indeed install to where they were meant to be placed for the Composition Repository layer to pick them up.

So, both Installer and Uninstaller did indeed work, this second time of trying. It really has been one of those days. I think the intial failure might have been down to my inadvertently selecting an earlier version of Installer from my Context Menu list of handler applications for .pkg files, though not too sure.

Another observation, the Screensaver seems to take a long time to load and IMETD it actually crashes out the System Preferences application. I wonder if having a wee bit of a time out on loading the .wav might help. Also exporting that .wav as an .mp3 and using that file type might lighten the load, as might an .aac file.

Having a set of transitional backdrops to the Screensaver - Disneyland of course, might help to liven that item up. Set up some conditionals so that one doesn't get old Walt reiterating so frequently. Just a thought.

Did you use Composition Tool to flatten the composition? Not sure if it would have also helped in this case, but worth mentioning.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Walt Disney Head

AWESOME.

I didn't try the installer, so I have no comments on that.

If I was going to make any note, it would probably just be that it would work on GPU's that are openCL supported. You might even be able to use the OpenCL info patch to turn off the renderers when OpenCL isn't supported on a machine and gives a little string message instead - b/c CPU fallback usually is usually pretty slow.

Listing OS might not be a horrible idea for people in the far future looking back, but at this point 10.5 is so ancient history that it's kinda sad. (You can't even program for iOS 5.1 on SL anymore!)

Congratulations, cool idea.

emanuel lopes's picture
Re: Walt Disney Head

Thanks!

Well, I said that I'm going to follow only some of the advice given by Cybero because I think I won't have much time available to improve the project. I've already included the license text in the zip file, since Absolute Manage InstallEase doesn't allow me to insert that text in the installer itself. I also listed the OS in the post.

Regards