Hi, I'm new to this whole Quartz Composition thing!

Where are they installed to? (include a screen shot of the finder window).

How are you searching for them? (include the patch creator image)

What shows up in the logs? (open console.app, look for stuff starting with "Quartz Composer")

Thanks for the speedy reply...

Please be patient, I'm not just new to QC & Kineme, I'm new to computing too.

Kineme3D plugin: /Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches

Particle Tools Plugin: /Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Plug-Ins

console says that neither of them are valid QC plugins.

Hope this is helpful.

Particle Tools is in the wrong location -- all our plugins go in the Quartz Composer Patches folder.

Kineme3D should work where it's located.

Make sure its your user Library folder, not the system one (i.e. it's in your home directory's Library, not your Macintosh HD's Library folder -- they functionally similar, but it's safer to put ours in your user one so it doesn't disrupt system-wide settings).

can you copy/paste the console message?

I"m going to chime in with the requisite "close QC, install plugins(patches), then restart QC".

Yikes, I have pretty much everything in the main HD folder :o)

having them in the main HD folder isn't a problem -- it's just annoying for other users (for my machines, my wife uses both, and having stuff not freak out and 'splode when it's under development is nice for her). It's also handy if a faulty plugin is installed -- you can log in as another user, and make sure it is the plugin, and not something else going crazy.

At the end of the day, if you're the sole user of the machine, or if you don't develop plugins, or if you don't live on bleeding-edge betas, it's not a big deal, mostly a matter of taste (smokris and I come from unix admin backgrounds, where user/system stuff is strictly distinct... kinda habit for us).

Well, ironically, I do use the same logic when deciding where to put plugin/patches, except that I usually give the kineme ones a free pass, and just install them in the HD... even the betas, because they tend to have a good percentage of success.

It is the really off the wall stuff, "alpha" things that I gleam from the web, or even releases from other people/companies that I feel "iffy" about that I put in the user folder.... like if I can't read the language of the website... it goes in the user folder :o)

I did a nice cleanup, because things were getting slightly haphazard (but nothing out of place really... just a matter of taste). I went ahead and backed up all of my loaded plugins, and a few that I selectively load, and I had 130 items! I was actually shocked at the amount of plug-ins I have accumulated. Though, as I said, I don't keep every one of them loaded... mostly for stability issues...eg., they are "learning experience" plugins of mine, or mods to other people's.

As I was doing this, I was thinking about how you have a version of kinemcore laying around that does drag and drop with 3D patches... and was thinking that even for the valid problems with drag and drop, that it would still be pretty cool to have that work with the 3D stuff. (btw, as I was moving stuff around, I realized that it is kind of surprising that you didn't put in .off file support into kineme3D, when I was looking at the off loader plugin that you did).

Drag & Drop is actually a per-plugin thing (so kinemecore wouldn't do it, but kineme3d would, and audiotools would, and filetools would, etc).

OFF is a pathetic 3d format -- no normals (not a big deal), and no texture coords (making it 100% useless). I don't see a point in supporting file formats that are just vertex data... you can't texture them, you can't do anything interesting in glsl with them.

Thanks for your help, ALL working now.

Just needed to restart QC.

Can anybody direct me towards some decent getting started tutorials, i want to intergrate QC/Kineme into my live dj sets. Any helpful plugins?

Thanks

Join Apple's Quartz composer dev mailing list (lots of helpful people there -- lists.apple.com)

Check out the links at the bottom of the wikipedia page on Quartz Composer for more good sources of QC info. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer

so i to at first was confused when installing plugins. the kineme video helped me get started. i had upgraded from tiger to leopard so i had a few more options. i ran into trouble, with a tuio plugin my first plugin for qtz. i must have tried 3 of them, all different releases and finally got one that worked for leopard. subsequently i had a tuio plugin in all my folders. so me being the lazy ass i am some times forgot which folder was which, so i put all my kineme plugins and the ones i build in both folders, in my HD/library.

knowing this is not what i am supposed to do it works. now the only time i get warnings is when i build an xcode app with the qc template. it tells me kineme.* is invalid plugin for folder. its just a warning so it does not matter to me. of course i tried removing them. this is the tricky part, once i remove the plugins that are in the wrong folder none of my plugins will work. i tried wiping out my qtz preference file, an old school mac fix but that didn't do the trick, so i keep a copy of my plugins in both folders. so i get some warnings, but it does not seem to cause problems with quartz itself. i get some warnings, and the offending plugins get sent to apple on a crash report. they should see the kineme plugins and realize that they should incorporate these tools in qtz so it really does not bother me, except the fact that i like to clean up warnings, in xcode and i can't do this without loosing all the add on functionality kineme brings to quartz.

Hmm, I may have asked this before actually!!! Good point... the only reason I ask is because there is a large library of public .off files around (thought I don't know how decent they look). I'm realizing as a type this that I haven't even tried them in the fbx converter, it most likely works...

dust, the warning is really functional though. I mean, there should be some kind of prompt to tell you that you are using something that isn't "apple" or standard API. heheh, maybe you should suggest that they have "warnings" and "mild warnings".