Chapter 11. Interacts

When a host presents a graphical user interface to an image effect, it may optionally give it the chance to draw its own custom GUI tools and to be able to interact with pen and keyboard input. In OFX this is done via the OfxInteract suite, which is found in the file ofxInteract.h.

OFX interacts rely on openGL to perform all drawing in interacts, due to its portabilty, robustness and wide implementation.

Each object that can have their own interact a pointer property in it which should point to a separate main entry point. This entry point is not the same as the one in the OfxPlugin struct, as it needs to respond to a different set of actions to the effect.

There are two things in an image effect can have their own interact, these are...

Hosts might not be able to support interacts, to indicate this, two properties exist on the host descriptor which an effect should examine at description time so as to determine its own behaviour. These are...

Interacts are separate objects to the effect they are associated with, they have their own descriptor and instance handles passed into their separate main entry point.

An interact instance cannot exist without a plugin instance, an interact's instance, once created, is bound to a single instance of a plugin until the interact instance is destroyed.

All interacts of the same type share openGL display lists, even if they are in different openGL contexts.

All interacts of the same type will have the same pixel types (this is a side effect of the last point), this will always be double buffered with at least RGB components. Alpha and the exact bit depth is left to the implementation.

So for example, all image effect overlays share the same display lists and have the same pixel depth, and all custom parameter GUIs share the same display list and have the same pixel depth, but overlays and custom parameter GUIs do not necassarily share the same display list/pixel depths.

An interact instance may be used in more than one view. Consider an image effect overlay interact in a host that supports multiple viewers to an effect instance. The same interact instance will be used in all views, the relevant properties controlling the view being changed before any action is passed to the interact. In this example, the draw action would be called once for each view open on the instance, with the projection, viewport and pixel scale being set appropriately for the view before each action.

Overlay Interacts

Hosts will generally display images (both input and output) in user their interfaces. A plugin can put an interact in this display by setting the effect descriptor kOfxImageEffectPluginPropOverlayInteractV1 property to point to a main entry.

The viewport for such interacts will depend completely on the host.

The GL_PROJECTION matrix will be set up so that it maps openGL coordinates to canonical image coordinates.

The GL_MODELVIEW matrix will be the identity matrix.

An overlay's interact draw action should assume that it is sharing the openGL context and viewport with other objects that belong to the host. It should not blank the background and it should never swap buffers, that is for the host to do.