Learning Resources

Obviously, we will be learning TD within this class. However, as mentioned, TouchDesigner is a complex program with a steep learning curve. It is therefore useful to have multiple pathways to learning about this program, as some will work better for certain of you. I would encourage you to familiarize yourself with some of the following, as additional resources for your TD adventure.

nVoid TouchDesigner Book

The following book by nVoid is a great resource for reading about basic concepts in TD from a different voice. I would highly encourage you to download this book and read through chapter 8 over the next week.

• Introduction to TouchDesigner 099. sponsored by nVoid. 2019. Available at: nvoid.github.io/book/en/introductiontotouchdesigner.pdf

TD Wiki

The official TouchDesigner Wiki is another critical resource in problem solving and learning. I would bookmark this site.

• TouchDesigner Documentation - Main Page

About TouchDesigner

To get started, please watch the following artist, bileam tschepe from Berlin, overview of the environment from a high level. The following videos will then take you through some additional high-level details in a bit more depth.

{ NOTE: } You can choose to follow along to the videos on this page or not. I will walk you through a “Hello World” later in this weeks content.

Interface

At this point, if you have not already done so, I would encourage you to open TouchDesigner and follow along.

Operators

Operators can loosely be thought of as equivalent to objects in Object Oriented Programming (OOP). They are the building blocks for our networks. (A network is a collection of operators)

Different signal flows and arrangements of operators result in different outcomes.

Building Networks (or a collection of interconnect operators…)

The connections of operators that we create in TouchDesigner are called “Networks.” Just like Max has the convention of calling its work space a patch, and processing (or P5) it’s workspace a sketch, TouchDesigner follows in this pattern by giving it’s workspace a name.

Networks primarily flow as streams of information between nodes of the same family. In Touch this is represented visually as objects/nodes/ops of the same color. Ops, short for operators, are the primary building blocks in TouchDesigner networks. Ops, from an abstract viewpoint, represent data types.

• TOPs – Texture Operators (purple) – represent texture / image information. These deal with 2D data and visual operations.
• CHOPs – Channel Operators (green) – are arrays of values. These focus on motion, audio, animation, and control signals.
• SOPs – Surface Operators (blue) – are geometry data – these have all sorts of pieces tied to them, most importantly we need to think of them as spatial data, meaning they deal with 3D points and polygons.
• MATs – Materials (yellow) – are materials and shaders – these are used when we’re doing realtime rendering.
• DATs – Data Operators (mauve) – are data operators – this is where we do all of our scripting and can enter data that’s not an image, list, or geometry.

Saving

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