NFTs are a hot topic right now. You’ve probably heard of Beeple making almost $70 million dollars by selling his art as NFTs. What are they? What can they do? Are they right for you? What about the environmental costs? In this post, I’ll give you a quick summary of what they are, how you…
A big choice that artists and developers have to make at some point in your life is whether you should get a job at an existing company or if you should be a freelancer/studio owner. This can be a challenging question and I’ve given lots of our HQ PRO members the following breakdowns to help…
TouchDesigner is always growing in its Python capabilities. Whether it’s the newer and shinier, like OpenCV and Script TOP, or more under the hood features like optimized expressions. One TouchDesigner Python feature that has been missed by many TouchDesigner developers is the tdu module. Let’s take a look! What is the TouchDesigner TDU Python module? The…
It’s always a great time of year when a big TouchDesigner release is dropped. Over the years we’re seeing a change of pace in development from a constant flow of new features appearing in the stable branch towards a bigger stable release happening while new features get tested in experimental. The first official big 2021…
Oh boy! Spicy topic. We’ve all been there. Apps crash, work is lost, everyone goes home frustrated. This could happen with any application, not just TouchDesigner, and I remember a good expression I heard many years ago that we work in “unstable media.” TouchDesigner does have some nice mechanisms that can help us with this…
TouchDesigner is a vast application with so many possibilities and avenues of development. You could make art works almost entirely using only one operator family before you even dive into Python or GLSL or C++. So what are the critical pieces of knowledge you need as a beginner? What are the best bang-for-buck pieces of…
We all love using Python in TouchDesigner. It gives you so much flexibility and power to create whatever you want. But I’m sure you’ve heard all the pros say “be careful! Python can get real slow!” While this is true, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t easy ways to optimize your Python usage so you…
Banding is a big issue in a lot of content. It’s the thing we’re least expecting to deal with when it comes time to delivering either rendered content or a generative content. It can strike when you least expect it and picky clients will hound you till the end of the earth for it. There…
What’s a Transactional API? Simple. It’s an API that is focused on delivering fast, reliable, 1-to-1 interactions with users. You can think of transactions as things like email notifications, push notifications, SMS messaging, and similar. While these might not sound like something you’d need in your toolkit, you’d be surprised how many projects require some…
There are many different ways to externalize settings for an installation. You could use CSV, Excel files, text files, and more. These are all simple and easy to use, but what happens if you want to store data that’s a bit more complex? We usually end up turning to either JSON, XML, or YAML. Personally…