You’ve all heard me over the years talking about saving money and trying to make hardware last as long as possible. I often harp on about how CPU architecture is relatively unchanged over the years in terms of raw performance and how GPU’s, while getting progressively faster, are generally unchanged in terms of features. nVidia…
There’s a funny thing that happens to intermediates and pros once you’ve been using TouchDesigner for a few years: you stop reading release notes for new builds because you have real work to do. The problem with this is that sometimes new features and big changes roll out and you won’t hear about until much…
This week we had a topic request come in asking us how we would approach initializing a project that has a lot of CHOP networks linked to animations. This includes networks of Button COMPs, Animation COMPs, Timer CHOPs, Trigger CHOPs, and more. I’m sure many folks, ourselves included, have been stuck in this tricky question…
Building user interfaces in TouchDesigner has been getting much more interesting over the past year. The release of Widgets have given us a whole new avenue for creating quick and easy user interfaces that have complex functionality and are aesthetically pleasing. There has been one TouchDesigner user interface element that has alluded many of us…
One of the challenges of integrating Notch Blocks in TouchDesigner was that scaling up the interactivity could be tricky. If you needed 10 interactive touch points, whether from Kinect joints or touch screens, you would need to expose 10 different sets of transform positions. Then you’d import the Notch Block into TouchDesigner and have to…
Have you ever wondered how films get such beautiful colour looks? Have you tried to get Instagram-style filters in TouchDesigner? These kinds of things can be quite time intensive and difficult to do if you’re trying to manually use Level TOPs and can often end up in sprawling networks just to get what you thought…
Let’s get it out of the way: we all wish we could export an executable app from TouchDesigner. While we can’t do that now, there are some good techniques we can use to make packaging small projects as we ship them out to customers or move them between different systems. That’s where TouchDesigner’s VFS (virtual…
It can be easy to miss some of the exciting features that get released in TouchDesigner. One of the ones that is really exciting are the dynamic features added to components that allow them to scale easily with other elements of TouchDesigner’s user interface. UIs have always been a little bit tricky for many developers,…
We love making art. That’s a fact. But another hidden fact is that most installations will have some form of text in them. Whether the text is artistic or not depends on the project! That aside, there are a lot of secret tricks that allow pros to use the Text TOP effectively in TouchDesigner to…
The Interactive & Immersive Championship was the first ever eSports event for TouchDesigner developers and it has finally come to an end this weekend. The event had 29 competitors who had to conceive and build beautiful TouchDesigner art live on-the-fly on Twitch for the chance of winning thousands of dollars in prizes. The competitors didn’t…