Particles in Max

My usual work environment for all things visual is Jitter in Max/MSP. To be honest though, it had been a fair amount of time since I’d tried to delve deeper into Jitter, as I was focusing on learning different software. I’ve recently gotten back into creating visuals and want to get my Max chops up to date. So I decided to follow along in building a particle system in Max/MSP using Jitter and Gen. While the concepts remain the same, the workflow and terminology in Max can be quite different, so I used the Amazing Max/MSP Tutorials on YouTube to help me understand some of the mathematics and semantics of using Gen by following along to their particle system tutorial. Max has its own native particle system, but seeing a particle system built from basic Max objects and some Gen code was useful for figuring out future abstractions. For now though, I implemented their particle system, added some color and trail tweaks. I also added a three spheres, the red sphere is an attractor and the two blue spheres repel.


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Written on March 6, 2018