Category: Notch

General summary

Building off of previous Python workshops, this class aims to demystify a few of the elements often used when doing advanced Python development work in TouchDesigner. From using storage to writing your own extensions we’ll work through the several concepts that will help you better leverage Python in TouchDesigner for installations and events. From the conceptual to the concrete, by the end of the workshop you will have both worked with abstract concepts in the textport and created a functioning tool for saving presets.

Instructor

Matthew Ragan

What’s included?

• Over 5 hours of HD video
• TouchDesigner 099 project files and examples

Workshop objectives

• Understand functions and classes in Python
• Learn how to use list comprehensions in TouchDesigner
• Deploy Python Storage inside of TouchDesigner
• Build extensions in TouchDesigner to build your own components
• Build a powerful and flexible preset systems using extensions
• Learn about dependencies, properties, and attributes of extensions

Pre-requisites

• Basic knowledge of TouchDesigner
• Basic-to-Intermediate Python in TouchDesigner

General summary

We all know user interfaces in TouchDesigner are hard. If you’ve taken our Perfect User Interfaces training you’ll know all the ins-and-outs of creating your own user interface elements from scratch. But what if you need a UI made quickly? What if you want to skip building your own UI pieces? Widgets to the rescue! Widgets are the new and powerful way to make user interfaces quickly and easily in TouchDesigner. What they lack currently in their customization, they make up for in speed of deployment and out-of-the-box features that are easy to access through their custom parameters. Combined with new features to TouchDesigner such as bindings, creating quick, scaling, and aesthetically-pleasing user interfaces is a breeze. .

What’s included?

• Over 2 hours of HD video
• Templates of TouchDesigner projects created in the training

Workshop objectives

• Understand how the Widget system works
• Learn to control the parameters and values of widgets
• Re-scale widget values
• Learn to build a simple UI with widgets
• Discover Bindings and how they work with Widgets
• Create an advanced UI with multiple pages of buttons, sliders, and fields
• Add Material Designer and unicode icons to your Widget UI
• Understand the updating system built into widgets
• Learn to automatically generate a Widget UI for your components

Pre-requisites

• None!

Everyone has seen pictures of TouchDesigner projects with hundreds of operators and wires all over the place. Impressive, right?

No! In fact, the opposite is true. If your projects look like this, you’re seriously hampering your TouchDesigner installations – and your potential to consistently get high-profile gigs:

• With hundreds of operators rendering on a single network, your computer will slow to a crawl.
• The messier your project architecture is, the harder it is to collaborate. Eventually, working with a team becomes impossible. Even working alone, keeping everything straight in your head becomes a recipe for disaster.
• Finally, your project is far more likely to break when you update it. This is because everything is coupled together (more on this later).

If you want to create large-scale installations or consistently work on projects in a professional capacity, you need a project architecture that is clean, organized, and easy to use.

The best project architectures – those used by the pros – are so streamlined that they make programming TouchDesigner look boring.

I share how to do this in my training, “TouchDesigner Project Architectures for Professionals.”

In “TouchDesigner Project Architectures for Professionals”, I give you my exact project architecture system – the same system that’s made it possible for me to create installations for Nike, Google, Kanye West, Armani, TIFF, VISA, AMEX, IBM, and more.

With my project architecture system at your disposal, you will:

• Dramatically shorten your development cycles. By reducing complexity in your project architecture, you eliminate unnecessary steps in the development process. And because you’ve created an intuitive working environment, the tasks that remain get done exponentially quicker. Shorter development cycles let you adapt to client demands, as well as take on more advanced – and better paying – gigs.
• Collaborate effectively. Once projects get bigger, a simplified architecture like mine is the only way to work with a team. And effective collaboration is a requirement for anyone looking to work long-term professionally with TouchDesigner.
• Never refactor again. When I first started with TouchDesigner, I would sometimes spend days rebuilding my projects. With my current project architecture, I never have to refactor – and neither will you.

We accomplish this through my 3 core project architecture concepts:

• Standardize: This is part of what enables effective collaboration, which is necessary if you want to create complex, large-scale installations. When you standardize your project architectures, you speed up your development cycle while also minimizing the chances of introducing bugs into your workflow.
• Compartmentalize: By isolating nodes and features into compartments, we can introduce logic into our workflow. This reduces the need to refactor projects down the road, makes it easier to optimize nodes and wires, and promotes the re-use of specific components (i.e. logger, movie player), which dramatically reduces development time.
• Decouple: The cornerstone of collaboration, decoupling lets us separate our functionality from our contr