Players are the areas where you can add a source of external content. As of HeavyM 2.3, players can support these categories of medias: photos, videos, GIFs, Webcam streams, Syphon/Spout streams, NDI streams, Generative Shaders, Text.
You can manage the content of your players from the source bin, on the right of your interface. This is detailed in another article of this guide.
Creating players
Players are predefined quadrilateral shapes. You can add them by drag & dropping the corresponding icon from the toolbar (as you would do for faces), by using the shortcut [Shift + P], or from the right-click menu in the canvas.
To differentiate them from faces in the canvas, they have square vertices instead of round ones.
For photos, videos and GIFs, you can also directly drop your medias in the canvas, it will automatically create a player that contains it. If you drop more than one at a time, it will even create a playlist with all of them directly!
Editing Players
Basic manipulation operations and transformations of shapes are described in a dedicated article.
Unlike faces and masks, players always have 4 points and you can't curve their sides. However, you can still move these 4 vertices, it doesn't have to stay a rectangle, and this will stretch what is displayed inside.
If you need to distort the texture in your player further, you can use the warping module. Warping is a technique used to manipulate a texture in order to correct its distortion, whether it is to adjust its shape on a complex surface or for creative purposes.
Turning on the warping module
The warping module can be toggled on from the properties of a player that appear on the panel on the left when one is selected, or simply by double-clicking on a player. (To turn it off, just use Escape.)
Once it is on, you'll see points appear on your player. You can then move them to distort your texture.