Successfully Prepare for a TouchDesigner Job Interview
Greetings, TouchDesigner developers! We’ve all faced that nerve-wracking moment of sitting down for an interview, hoping to land the next exciting opportunity. Interviews are part of […]
Greetings, TouchDesigner developers! We’ve all faced that nerve-wracking moment of sitting down for an interview, hoping to land the next exciting opportunity. Interviews are part of […]
Running an immersive art studio can feel like a daunting challenge. Whether you’re just starting or you’ve been operating for a few years, the challenges around […]
Working in immersive media can be tough if you aren’t living in a major metropolitan city. Often you can feel excluded and find it tough to […]
In ever-changing industries it can be hard to feel like you have secure footing underneath you. Especially as media technologies seem to completely change every few […]
Do you have an awesome TouchDesigner or another interactive & immersive project, and you want to share it but need to know where? You can submit […]
Have you been sick of commercial work and need a break to focus on your art practice? Or do you have a strong artist practice but […]
On Friday, August 26th, The Interactive & Immersive HQ partnered with Ottomata Studio to host an in-person community meetup in Montreal, Canada. The meetup was a […]
On Saturday, April 30th, The Interactive & Immersive HQ hosted its first in-person community meetup in Los Angeles, California. It was a public and free event […]
I was recently on a call where someone was asking me for a ballpark estimate on how much it would cost to develop the software and […]
It’s that time of year again! The holidays are here and you might be thinking of getting some odds and ends for friends and colleagues working […]
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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.
Matthew Ragan
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. .
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:
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:
We accomplish this through my 3 core project architecture concepts:
I’ve spent over 8 years refining my project architecture into an easy-to-implement, repeatable system that any designer can use. Once you learn my system, you’ll be able to take on projects you didn’t think you were capable of. You will also have the confidence you need to land better gigs and meet challenging client demands with flexibility and ease.
Want to level-up your TouchDesigner skills and create projects that can intelligently make content and generative decisions using weather and climate data?
How about installations that span forty-story high-rises that use Twitter posts to prompt generative designs?
Big clients – with big budgets – demand a level of immersion deeper than the use of Microsoft Kinect and Leap Motion interaction. They want to integrate social media, custom web apps and their own CMS to create interactive installations that bring people together in a way they haven’t experienced before.
In short, they want to use technology to become part of the broader conversation.
Fortunately for us, we’re able to deliver this level of immersion by integrating external data sources into our TouchDesigner projects.
The catch? Bringing external APIs into TouchDesigner can be challenging:
That’s why I created my latest training, “Join the Broader Conversation: How to Use External Data and APIs in Your TouchDesigner Installations”. Made for the complete Python beginner, the training provides you with everything you need to begin integrating external data sources with your TouchDesigner projects.
When you’re done you’ll be able to charge more and secure bigger projects than you would previously.
In this 1.5 hour video training (which includes example project files), we will:
Without any guidance, I’ve found that learning to integrate external data natively into TouchDesigner takes new designers between 20-40 hours – and that’s not including the trial and error phase that comes with implementing these concepts for the first time. Many people quit out of frustration.
Want to avoid spending $50,000+ on the wrong computer hardware?
Or having to look your client in the eye and say “I don’t know” when they ask why their shiny new immersive media installation looks like a stuttering, jaggy hot mess?
Then you need this training.
When I first started working with TouchDesigner in 2011, I thought the most valuable skill I had to offer was my ability to code beautiful interactive and immersive media projects for my clients.
While this IS important, I quickly realized that that what my clients valued most was my ability to create an installation that performed perfectly – no tearing, stuttering, judder, or any other issues. If you think this sounds easy, you haven’t been working with Touch long enough.
This is one of the reasons my clients pay me $1,500 per day.
When I first started, I encountered all the issues mentioned above. I overcame them with a combination of all-nighters, hiring the right (and expensive) experts, and in some cases, luck. I also wasted a lot of time and money.
With experience, I was able to preemptively solve for all these performance issues.
That’s why I created the “Creating Flawless Installations with TouchDesigner” training. Now you can benefit from my 7+ years of experience without having to make the costly mistakes I did.
After this training, you will have the confidence you need to deploy immersive design and interactive technology installations for big brands who pay top dollar for your skills. And you’ll be one of the select few individuals in this industry that know how to do what I do with TouchDesigner.
In this 1.5 hour video training (which includes example project files), we will cover:
Want to create large-scale video arrays and real-time LED facades that span high rises?
How about installations that use GPU particle systems, volumetric lighting, and multi-composite operators?
As lots of you know, this is all possible with TouchDesigner – sort of.
Out-of-the-box TouchDesigner is great when you’re just starting out. But as your interactive installations grow larger and your clients begin to want more generative and technical content, there are several challenges that arise and the cracks begin to show.
Problems typically fall into two broad categories:
When problems due to scale such as these inevitably occur, the standard TouchDesigner functionality and nodes only gets you so far. And it doesn’t take very long before you have to explain to your client that you’re unable to deliver what they’re asking for.
Lucky for us, we can leverage the code that powers a lot of TouchDesigner to create installations of virtually unlimited scale and technical possibility.
We do this by learning how to program GLSL Shaders. GLSL is the programming language on which many of the features of TouchDesigner are created even now.
When you understand how to apply GLSL to TouchDesigner, you’re effectively turning on “God Mode.”
That’s why I created my training, “Turn on God Mode in TouchDesigner with GLSL Shaders.” In it, I cover the following concepts:
TouchDesigner is the leading platform for interactive media and immersive design, and is used to create the world’s largest installations. Elburz Sorkhabi explores and explains concepts in TouchDesigner revolving around network optimization and performance bottlenecks.
The user interface (UI) is an integral part of any TouchDesigner installation.
Most clients want dynamic installations that they can control as needed, without consulting a designer or programmer for every change. This is usually through a control panel and UI they can access.
Even more important are user-facing UIs – think interactive panels, turntable additions for live shows, and customizable remote controls. This is what many clients have in mind when they decide to contract someone to design an interactive installation.
But if UIs are so central to TouchDesigner installations, why is it so hard to make them not suck? Most UIs slow down installations and break when you try and resize a component or add multiple pages. They’re also ugly.
So as always, I’m fixing the problem by providing a training.
In my latest 2-hour training, you will learn how to:
A great TouchDesigner installation needs a great user interface. Get the training you need to provide professional UI for top clients today.
Elburz deep dives on all the the inner workings of Python in TouchDesigner. This introductory course takes you from the very beginning of your Python journey and explains concepts that will create a powerful foundation for all your Python scripting in TouchDesigner.
Elburz deep dives on all the the inner workings of Python in TouchDesigner. This introductory course takes you from the very beginning of your Python journey and explains concepts that will create a powerful foundation for all your Python scripting in TouchDesigner.
Ever wonder how TouchDesigner pros work so fast? Ever see a friend or colleague do something and think “How did you do that??” Elburz puts together the top tips and tricks that everyone needs to know when working with TouchDesigner. Speed up your workflows and explore undocumented features across both the application and each operator family.