manual

 

modulator & trigger

 
 

Global Modulator

The global modulator module has several purposes:

Modulator control

It's main purpose is to provide an easy way to control all the modulators in your project. By pressing it's activation key (ESCAPE by default), all other modulators will be activated as well, so that subsequent key-presses will be send to all modulators simultaniously. This enables you, for example, to start and stop all modulators at once or change the speed of the complete animation.

Mouse Values

The global modulator's two value out connectors enable you to use the x or y position of the mouse as modulation values. If the mouse is in the lower left corner of the screen their output will be (0, 0). The mouse in the upper right corner will generate (1, 1).

You may (temporarily) stop the generation of this values and/or bind them to one or more modulators (see below).

Texture Set

You define in the global modulator's inspector which texture set will be used in the current project.

Background

You may define a background color or image for your scene by connecting attribute modules to the global modulators attribute in connector.

Clear frame

You may also deactivate the clearing of the frame buffer (see below).

value in connectors

name description
t
range
default
clear frame if deactivated, the frame buffer won't be cleared before the scene is displayed
b
yes, no
yes

Modulator

Modulators provide the 'heart beats' of your animation:

The sawtooth curve above represents the continuously generated values in the range [0,1] at a modulator's value out connectors. You will use this values to change the attributes of other modules by connecting to their value in connectors.

Each modulator stores internally a list of numbers, called it's sequence. The numbers in the sequence represent the duration of each tooth in the sawtooth curve above. This enables modulators to generate an irregular rhythm. For example, you could generate the following curve with a sequence of [1, 2, 1, 3]:

The mathematical operation modules provide more possibilities to change this curve.

Controlling Modulators

After activating a modulator by pressing it's activation key (AK from now on), you may control the rhythm of it's 'heart beat' in several ways:

key function

starts/stops the modulator

reset the modulator (jumps back to start of it's sequence)
ESCAPE start/stop mouse modulation. If stopped, the global modulator's value out connectors for the mouse values will remain constant.
x

(un)bind mouse x. Replaces the modulator's values with those of the global modulator's mouse x values.

Enables you to (temporarily) change the attributes which are connected to the modulator's value out connectors via mouse movements.

y (un)bind mouse y. Same as above for vertical mouse values.
AK,... by repeatedly pressing the modulator's activation key while holding down , you define a new sequence. The new sequence will be activated, when you press AK
AK replace the old sequence with the new manually entered sequence.
1,..,9
1,..,9
define a factor for the following operations:
smooth start. starts the modulator and increases it's sequence speed over a duration of factor seconds from zero to full speed.
smooth stop. decreases the modulator's sequence speed over a duration of factor seconds from full to zero speed.
* multiplies the speed of the sequence with factor
/ divides the speed of the sequence by factor
increases the speed of the sequence by 1/factor
decreases the speed of the sequence by 1/factor

The modulator control keys displayed above are the default. You may change them in the preferences window.

Modulator Status

Depending of the project, it may be difficult sometimes to keep track of the current status of all the modulators. The status line at the bottom of the sreen might help you in those cases.

For each module, a small 'meter' displays it's current value. In case of the global modulator, which is always represented by the leftmost meter, two values are displayed (mouse x and y values). A dotted meter indicates an inactive and a solid line an active modulator. Stopped modulators are displayed with a green and started modulators with a red background. A blue meter bar indicates that the modulator is bound to one of the mouse values.

For example, in the image above you see two groups of three deactivated and three activated modulators. In each group, the first modulator is stopped, the second and third modulators are playing while the third modulator is bound to a mouse value.

Activating modulation > show status will display the same information in textual form above the status line:

Trigger

In contrast to a modulator, the trigger module provides a more interactive and less automatic way to change your scene. After pressing it's activation key, it generates a sequence of values between [0,1] as well, but only once. It stays inactive afterwards (value 0) until you press it's activation key again:

This curve depicts the output of a trigger module whose activation key was pressed at time tk. The duration of the slope is defined by the value at the modules value in connector.

Activation Keys

You can change the activation keys of modulators and triggers in their inspector. But let me point out something that might confuse you:

The iput fields for activation keys are distinguishable from normal input fields by their gray background.

They behave a little bit different than input fields:

You are not able to edit their content in the same way you edit normal input fields: The special keys and text selection doesn't work (eg. doesn't advance to the next input field and a doesn't select the content).

The reason is: you can use the special function keys of normal input fields as activation keys (even ).

Sounds strange, but it's not that complicated: for example, if you want to activate a trigger by pressing a, simply click in the input field, press together with a and then .

One last note: You shouldn't use and modifiers for the activation key of modulators if you are interested in changing their sequence in play mode (see above).

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