My rig

A quick run down of the hardware and software I am using. The power of shaders is that you get to utilize the power of the GPU so you really need a computer with a separate GPU.

Sager NP6652 with 15.6” FHD 16:9 LED IPS Backlit Matte Wide screen (1920x1080)
4th Generation Intel® Haswell Core™ i7-4700MQ (2.4GHz - 3.4GHz, 6MB Intel® Smart Cache)
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 750M 2,048MB PCI-Express GDDR3 DX11 w/ Optimus™ Technology
16GB - DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory
128GB OS SSD
1TB Data Drive
Windows 7 Professional Premium 64-Bit
Ableton Live 9
Max 6.1.7
V-Module 0.9.1

In the beginning....

So a while ago, two interests of mine ended up converging.

The first one is Ableton Live in which I had been playing around making the occasional mix f some of my favourite tunes. In my usual dilletante fashion, before even really getting to grips with the basics of Live, I decided to install Max4Live. And then before even really beginning to understand Max4Live, I downloaded an amazing set of tools called V-Module - this is a set of Max4Live devices that utilize the Jitter video manipulation elements of MaxMSP.

The second thing that piqued my interest was the rather amazing www.shadertoy.com. This website has examples of GLSL Fragment/Pixel Shaders. A lot of them a really quite inspiring, and achieve amazing effects in the most elegant and concise way.

Check this out:-


Pretty fancy mountains - and imagine all created with a 512px square texture image and 280 characters of code! Mind blowing!

But then I realised that Jitter has the capability to host shaders - surely it should be possible to host some of the code from Shadertoy within Jitter?

So this blog is going to document, amongst other things, my experiments in using shaders within jitter/v-module