Located on the right of the interface, the Content panels contain all the content you can include in your mapping shapes, whether it is built-in or external content. Just below, the Master Shaders panel allows you to add shaders on the whole rendering, regardless of which sequence is playing.
Spoiler: I'm getting ahead a bit here, but know that the creativity in HeavyM is not limited to these panels! You'll see in other articles that once you've added your content from these panels, you can also add other post-processing shaders (like filters) on different parts of your mapping (not necessarily on the whole rendering like master shaders.)
The Content panels
The Group Effects panel
The red icon on the right lets you open the Group Effects panels. In this panel, you'll find effects, like geometric animations or transformations, that you can insert in your faces and customize with many parameters.
Effects can be activated with the switch on each tab and apply to all faces in the active group. To learn more on how to use these, please follow up with this article on the subject.
To check out all the existing effects and see some examples, head out to this glossary.
The Sources panel
The other kind of content you can display in your shapes is multimedia content. The Sources Bin contains all the sources you add, which you can then link to players in order to display them wherever you want in each sequence. You can even organize them in folders or group them in playlists!
The available types of multimedia content are: Videos, GIFs, Images, Shaders, Spout/Syphon streams, NDI streams, Webcam streams or Text.
The Sources panel holds your multimedia content in a bin, here are the different display/navigation options you can find there:
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Add Source: opens a dropdown menu of the available Source types. Choose in the list to add one to the bin. “Source” objects are explained here.
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Add folder (2.14): adds a folder in the multimedia bin. Folders are not a type of Source and are only for organization purposes. It’s all explained here.
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Collapse/Expand: folds or unfolds the view of the panel horizontally.
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List/Grid view options (2.14):
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View selector: allows switching between List view (only media names) or Grid view (media thumbnails). By default, the panel is in Grid view.
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Grid size selector (only in Grid view): allows to choose between 3 different sizes for Grid view thumbnails. By default, the middle size is selected.
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Additional options:
- Show names (for Grid view): allows to display/hide the names of medias in Grid view.
- Show extensions: allows to display/hide the file extensions (.jpg, .mov, etc) in the names of medias.
- Show bulk video controls: allows to display/hide a footer of the panel that shows different buttons (rewind all, pause all, play all). These buttons are playback actions that affect all videos at once and only videos. For instance, clicking on “Rewind all” would be like clicking on the “Rewind” button of all videos at once.
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Remove unused sources button: cleans the bin. This action removes all multimedia Sources that are not assigned to a player from the project. This action cannot be undone.
Note: this only removes the sources inside the project, if associated files had been collected & saved in the project folder, they won’t be removed.
Note: the view parameters are saved globally on your computer, you’ll find the same panel setup in each HeavyM session.
The Master Shaders panel
The purple icon on the right (insert icon) lets you open the Master Shaders panel. On top of the content you can fill your shapes with, you can also add effects that are like "filters" and affect the rendering: post-processing shaders.
The two types that affect the whole rendering are sequence shaders and, our focus here, the top of the tops, master shaders. These apply on the whole output, regardless of the sequence playing.
Learn all about Master shaders here.