There’s probably a billion different ways to draw the interface control known as the ‘dial’ or ‘knob’. But at a minimum, this virtual control must visually resemble its physical counterpart enough to make its operation obvious to the user. Who hasn’t turned a knob before?
The dial we’re making is a simple, line–based affair that’ll be easy to draw in code and will more or less look at home in Ableton Live or a similarly styled app.
The shape of the dial is defined by the 45° wedge taken from its bottom border. This gap in the outer border visually orients the control and indicates its linear minimum / maximum value operation. The border element also serves as a state indicator through the use of color. Inside the indicator is the knob. This is a purely decorative element meant to reference the circular shape of real-life knobs. Attached to the knob is the needle. The needle indicates the position of the knob and also serves as an interactive target.
If you’re making a Max for Live device that requires a dial control, you should use the built-in live.dial
object. Its colors are customizable, it'll save you time and, most of all, the live.dial
object will look and work like a native Live dial.
But, if you’re making a stand–alone MAX patch or just like the rich feel of artisanal dials, you’ll need to use the Max UI object pictctrl
and create the required image assets for it.
The pictctrl
object uses a single filmstrip–like image to represent all the states and steps of the control. Each individual state occupies a row in this image. That way you can specify active, inactive and disabled states (to name a few) in a single image. For this example, we’ll stick to just one default state for our dial so that our image is only one row tall. We’ll construct our pictctrl
image by arranging all the individual frames of the default state side by side in a row, like so:
pictctrl
’s image dimensions will vary in size depending on the size of the template frame and how many frames you want it to have. So, for example, if your dial control is 50px wide by 50px tall and you have 128 frames, your pictctrl
image will be 50px * 128 or 6400px wide. Common MIDI values range from 0-127 so 128 frames is a convenient number for mapping each dial frame to a unique data value.
Hand drawing every frame of your dial image in a program like Photoshop or Sketch will give you good results provided you’re willing to put in the time. But, if you want to speed things along, or if you just need to quickly make a Max dial control, the Knob Builder below was made for exactly that purpose. You can customize the dial’s size, wedge amount, colors and number of frames. Just save the final drawing that appears below the Builder to your computer and you’ve got the image asset required to build a simple pictctrl.
Now that we’ve got a frame–by–frame dial image, lets’s put it to use in a simple Max for Live device.
pictctrl
object onto the presentation area.pictctrl
selected on the canvas, select the Inspector tab and locate the Behavior section of the Attributes. Change the control type from Button to Dial.Thoughts? Questions? Corrections? Send ’em my way: justin.rhoades@gmail.com