The Interactive & Immersive HQ

Free Notch + TouchDesigner Virtual Gameshow

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Arminas Kazlauskas, Product Specialist at Notch, for a 3-day live streamed virtual event in collaboration with Notch. We covered a lot over the 3 live stream sessions and it flew by! We worked through building a virtual game show environment and exposing all of it’s properties from Notch, building TouchDesigner minigames and a framework for running Notch Blocks, and incorporating live Twitch chat commands to trigger it all in real-time. For all the community, we’ve put together the recordings of the streams on YouTube as well as all project file downloads so you can use all of our work as a basis for your own work or for learning.

Recordings

Let’s start with the recordings! There is a separate recording for each day and a quick description of what you’ll find in each day.

Day 1 – Building Content In Notch

Armin took the lead on the first day. He walked us through building an awesome virtual gameshow environment in Notch. We got to see the new virtual production features inside of Notch as well many of the new optimization tools to keep your project running at high framerates. We also discuss our pre-production process and show our technical diagrams that we put together while planning these streams.

Day 2 – TouchDesigner Media Server

Day 2 was PACKED! We covered a lot of stuff including:

  • overall TouchDesigner media server architecture
  • integrating Notch Blocks in TouchDesigner
  • setting up custom parameters to control Notch Block properties
  • integrating and parsing live Twitch chat for commands into TouchDesigner via WebSockets
  • building simple mini-games inside of TouchDesigner
  • how to use ZeroTier to remote edit Notch Blocks half way across the world

Get Our 7 Core TouchDesigner Templates, FREE

We’re making our 7 core project file templates available – for free.

These templates shed light into the most useful and sometimes obtuse features of TouchDesigner.

They’re designed to be immediately applicable for the complete TouchDesigner beginner, while also providing inspiration for the advanced user.

Day 3 – Live Installation

By this point in the stream we went over most of the setup and we setup the virtual gameshow to run live on Twitch and YouTube. It was running live and interactive for Twitch chat to control the different elements in the virtual game show. During this, Armin and myself did a Q&A with questions brought to us by our viewers covering Notch, TouchDesigner, and more. A great surprise for this stream was that Notch generously provided a few special prizes: Learner licenses along with a special limited gold keychain ring to go along with the dongle! Three of our viewers with great questions got to take those prizes home.

Project files

As we mentioned on stream, everything we built for these streams is readily available for the community! This includes:

  • Full Notch project with assets, models, textures inside of it of the whole virtual gameshow environment
  • Pre-compiled Notch Block for testing with in your media server or TouchDesigner
  • TouchDesigner project with mini games, integrated Twitch chat, and integrated Notch Block (warning for folks with non-production hardware, the project might take a minute or two to load)

Side note: When you launch the project, you’ll need to go into the Twitch chat component of the TouchDesigner project and read the instructions inside on how to setup your Oauth keys, otherwise it won’t be able to connect to Twitch chat. As well, in the Notch area, you’ll need to create a Streamlabs account and connect it to your Twitch account to be able to get a link for rendering Twitch chat into your project as a video texture.

Side note 2: if you’d like to integrate Twitch chat into your TouchDesigner project, make sure to check out these 2 blog posts that explain the process in much more detail!

Wrap up

We can’t thank the friendly folks at Notch for collaborating with us on this 3-day live virtual event. We had a great time getting it ready and we’re happy to bring these kind of learnings to the community along with all the free resources. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the streams, you’ll have a blast if nothing else and make sure to grab those project files! Enjoy!