2018 TouchDesigner Templates

What are these TouchDesigner templates about?

As we approach the end of the year, I decided it would be a nice thing to release some TouchDesigner template projects that would be useful to develops across a range of skill levels. They cover a bunch of techniques ranging from windowing concepts to web APIs to render picking. Some of the templates are simple/straight-forward educational examples while the others are base level templates you can use to build your own projects on.

What’s in the package?

I tried to include a range of templates as mentioned. Many of them are single examples from workshops I’ve released in the last little while. Here’s a quick list of the templates available.

Render Picking

Render picking is such a fantastic and unique feature in TouchDesigner, but it is often hard for new and advanced users to get the hang of it because there isn’t that much documentation or simple examples of it in use. It’s also a little bit strange to get it setup. I have 2 templates that are useful. The first is a barebones render pick setup that shows you the essential setup and prints out a little bit of information. The second example builds on that to example and lets you drag around a 3D objects being rendered. It’s the perfect template to start building your own render picking setups with.

GLSL

There are 3 drop dead simple examples of GLSL in the package. The first is just a barebones example of some basic compositing combined with scaling/ transforming. The other 2 projects show clean and easy-to-follow examples of how you can use multiple colour buffers. The one example creates a GLSL TOP that allows you to apply 5 separate alpha values to 5 different textures all inside of one shader, and then lets you output each of the processed textures separately. The final example shows the basic structure of how you could approach making a multi-in multi-out video matrix by using multiple colour buffers.

Using Container COMPs for outputs

This is a TouchDesigner tip for the ages. It’s the recommended way of creating output containers that are connected all to a single Window COMP, which hugely improves performance of installations when compared to what a lot of new users do, which is make separate Window COMPs per output screen.

Optimizing multiple processes

There’s a dead simple way to maximize the performance of multiple TouchDesigner projects running on the same computer. It can be done in 1 line of Python and takes only about 30 seconds to setup. You essentially turn off the drawing of background TouchDesigner processes you might have, such as those that process data but don’t draw to the screen, and stop them from wasting extra CPU/GPU resources.

How to fetch public web data

In 2018, and going into 2019, this is an essential skill. You need to be able to communicate with the web, whether you need to fetch data from a website or you need to communicate with an internal web server or CMS. The web API example shows you how to use Python’s Requests library to get public event data from GitHub and how to parse the JSON data into TouchDesigner tables, all natively

What’s the cost??

Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. No locked components, no nothings. Everything for your learning and usage. Click the link below to grab all 7 templates. Happy holidays!