MOSAIC - an openFrameworks based Visual Patching Creative-Coding Platform

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Table of Contents

• INSTALL
• OF_COMPATIBLE_RELEASE
• DEPENDENCIES
• DESCRIPTION
• SPECIFICATIONS
• CONTRIBUTING
• SCREENSHOTS
• LICENSE
• CREDITS

INSTALL

LINUX

Check the Mosaic installer here: https://github.com/d3cod3/Mosaic-Installer

MACOS

Get Mosaic last release here: https://github.com/d3cod3/Mosaic/releases Just unzip the downloaded release and copy Mosaic app in your Application folder, that's it!

WINDOWS

At the moment, Mosaic for windows is available as a release: https://github.com/d3cod3/Mosaic/releases, just download and run, or can be compiled using the Mosaic installer here: https://github.com/d3cod3/Mosaic-Installer, where you'll find a mosaic_windows_installer.sh script to run in a MSYS2 console. You'll find instructions for compiling in the repo readme.

OF COMPATIBLE RELEASE

0.11.0 STABLE (official download from OF site)

Compiled/tested with QTCreator on osx/linux/windows

If you want to build Mosaic, just download OF0.11.0 for your OS (osx, linux, windows) and follow the correspondent setup guide.

DESCRIPTION

A very commonly used quote from Albert Einstein goes like this: « If I can't picture it, I can't understand it. ». Following that thought, we'll eventually enter the realm of visual thinking, where complex ideas can be communicated in a simple way.

Mosaic is a visual thinking toolkit made by artists, for artists.

Emanuele Mazza started the Mosaic project in 2018, in strict relation with the work of ART+TECHNOLOGY research group Laboluz from the Fine Art faculty of the Universidad Politécnica de Valéncia (Spain). From the very beginning, the source code was released on the Github development platform with a focus on making the code modular and simple to read, in order to encourage potentially interested coders in participating and collaborating on the project. Recently in 2020, digital artist Daan de Lange became a contributor of Mosaic code, actively participating in code development and restructuring.

Mosaic is a multi-platform livecoding programming/patching environment for creating real-time audio-visual compositions. It's principally designed for live needs, as can be teaching in class, live performing in an algorave, or running a generative audio-visual installation in a museum. It aims to empower artists, creative coders, scenographers and other creative technologists in their creative workflow. It's a FLOSS, Free/Libre and Open Source Software with multi-platform support, and it's written in C++, offering high performance.

Mosaic is shipped with an internal code editor, non-blocking system dialogs, a programmable non-linear interactive timeline, an included patch video exporter with subtitler for easy tutorial creation, lua/python/glsl/bash live-coding and pure data live-patching capability, a good selection of audio synthesis modules, multiple fullscreen output windows capabilities ( as many as your system can have ) with an independent warping for each window, a map-map style integrated mapping module, and an easy to use osc sending/receiving objects/nodes for network communication.

The idea behind Mosaic is to facilitate human-machine communication, to amplify imagination and to speed up the creative workflow, without sacrificing the spectrum of possibilities. To achieve this, it bundles together various creative-coding tools, acting as an interactive bridge between them. It includes a collection of audio-visual objects that can be easily connected together using a nodal-based graphical interface, defining a custom dataflow.

Mosaic is mainly based on two frameworks : OpenFrameworks and ImGui. OpenFrameworks is an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding. Dear ImGui is a bloat-free graphical user interface for C++ with minimal dependencies. Together with the latter ones, Mosaic bundles comes with other 3rd party libraries such as libpd and numerous ofxAddons. It also embeds various programing languages for live-coding purposes : Lua with OF-bindings, Python ( 2.7 on osx, 3.8 on linux ) scripting interpreter, live compiling of GLSL shaders and editing/execute Bash scripts (macOS & linux) capabilities.

Mosaic is extendable : you can easily add custom objects. While this involves writing and compiling code, requiring some C++ knowledge, we aim to make this process as easy as possible. Thus, Mosaic is flexible and devoted to grow over time. For example, any Openframeworks project can be easily ported to Mosaic Objects, exposing them to the live-patching environment. This way, working with OF becomes way more modular, and you can make run-time adjustments. Possibilities are endless. Once created, plugins can either be statically compiled into Mosaic, or if you wish, there's also support for dynamically loading them, making it easy to share and distribute your objects with others.

KEYWORDS

Mosaic, ofxVisualProgramming, openframeworks, linux, macOS, windows, creative-coding, live-coding, physical, visual, scripting, transmedia, programming, visual-programming

DEPENDENCIES

ofxAudioAnalyzer -- Fork

ofxAudioFile

ofxBTrack -- Fork

ofxChromaKeyShader -- Fork

ofxCv

ofxEasing

ofxFFmpegRecorder -- Fork

ofxGLEditor

ofxJSON

ofxImGui -- Fork

ofxInfiniteCanvas -- Fork

ofxLua -- Fork

ofxMidi

ofxMtlMapping2D -- Fork

ofxNDI -- Fork

ofxPd

ofxPdExternals

ofxPDSP

ofxPython -- Fork

ofxTimeline -- Fork

ofxVisualProgramming

ofxWarp -- Fork

Some addons are forks of the original, due to some mods, compatibility with OF0.11 and the intention of cross-platform compiling (osx,linux,win)

SPECIFICATIONS

• FLOSS, Free/Libre and Open Source Software
• cross-platform (until Apple and Microsoft decides to drop support for openGL, then it will be Linux only)
• plugin injection capable, see ofxMosaicPlugin
• multi-threaded
• ImGui based GUI interface
• included automatic window video exporter with subtitler for easy tutorial creation
• non-blocking system dialogs
• internal code editor
• lua/python/glsl/bash live-coding
• pure data live-patching
• non-linear interactive timeline
• good selection of audio synthesis modules
• warping integrated on output window object
• mapmap style projection mapping module

OFXADDONS

Clone all the required addons listed:

cd <your_openframeworks_release_folder>/addons

git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxAudioAnalyzer
git clone https://github.com/npisanti/ofxAudioFile
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxBTrack
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxChromaKeyShader
git clone https://github.com/kylemcdonald/ofxCv
git clone https://github.com/arturoc/ofxEasing
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxFFmpegRecorder
git clone https://github.com/Akira-Hayasaka/ofxGLEditor
git clone https://github.com/jeffcrouse/ofxJSON
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxImGui
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxInfiniteCanvas
git clone --branch=of-0.10.0 https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxLua
git clone https://github.com/danomatika/ofxMidi
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxMtlMapping2D
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxNDI
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxPython
git clone https://github.com/danomatika/ofxPd
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxPdExternals
git clone https://github.com/npisanti/ofxPDSP
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxTimeline
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxVisualProgramming
git clone https://github.com/d3cod3/ofxWarp

Some addons use specific branches and remotes (usually in order to provide easy multiplatform support). Specially if you have already worked with OpenFrameworks, your current addons folder might be incompatible with Mosaic. To verify compatibility, it can be useful to cd path/to/mosaic && cd scripts/ofxAddonTool && ./ofxAddonTool.sh to get an oversight of ofxAddons compatibility.

Then clone Mosaic project as an openFrameworks example:

cd <your_openframeworks_release_folder>/apps/myApps

git clone --recursive https://github.com/d3cod3/Mosaic

Now you're ready to compile Mosaic! Load the .qbs project in QTCreator and compile it. Or just enter in Mosaic folder and run a make Release.

CONTRIBUTING

Contributing to the project adding new objects is relatively easy, as ofxVisualProgramming is at the core of Mosaic software, it has been implemented a plugin mechanism based on Pugg, in order to facilitate the extension and the creation of new objects/nodes to add at the ofxVisualProgramming/Mosaic default objects/nodes library. (see objects/nodes list below)

You can find the repo of the plugin template here: ofxMosaicPlugin, with some generic objects templates and more detailed info in the readme.

If you're curious, please try out Mosaic and don't hesitate to get in touch. Mosaic is open to anybody, contributions of any kind are welcome.

SCREENSHOTS

LICENSE

All contributions are made under the MIT License. See LICENSE.

CREDITS

Mosaic is a FLOSS, Free/Libre and Open Source Software.

The Mosaic team is composed by Emanuele Mazza , Daan de Lange and Maria José Martínez de Pisón.

Mosaic uses FFTW3, essentia, kiss_fft, libsamplerate, dr_libs and code from openframeworks all the included ofxAddons.