This is brush, a small Max/MSP/Jitter patch that I’ve compiled as a standalone application. It’s aimed at visualists who are just starting out and looking for software to play with. Programmatically, it’s very simple. Video from a live camera (or a movie file) is fed back on itself so that light stays on the canvas (screen). Thus, you can paint with the light in the room you’re in. Decay (fade time), tolerance (lower luma threshold) and color inversion are adjustable so you can adapt your performance to any lighting conditions.

I developed the patch in Keyworx last winter and ported it to M/M/J over the summer with the generous help of vade and other friends. The effect I was looking for turned out to be in one of the Jitter tutorial patches so, again, this is not a complex patch. It’s all in the performance — so get out there and use it!

The patch is under the same CC license that’s at the bottom of this blog. Of course, that doesn’t apply if you just rebuild it from the same tutorial patch I used.

• Download brush 0.1 for Mac OS X
• Download the source code (brush 0.1.pat) (requires Max/MSP/Jitter installation)
• Read a brief tutorial
• See video and stills of a brush performance

The application only works on Mac OS X but you can run the source code on Windows can’t run the patch on Windows because Max for Windows uses a different camera feed object. Sorry. I’ll see if I can get a Windows Max user to port it. (Get the fully functional Max/MSP/Jiitter demo for Mac and PC).