Over the past week, we’ve had a blast putting on our joint live stream with the Notch team! We’ve put together and explained building a virtual game show experience that is controllable through Twitch chat commands. Both Armin from Notch and I have shared a wealth of great tricks for TouchDesigner and Notch users. In this blog post, I’ve got two of the best tricks in an easy to digest fashion for you!
Notch Camera Transforms
The first great trick comes from Armin! I really enjoyed this trick but it works really well with content creation workflows. It allows you to take the current transforms from the orbit camera and apply them to a Camera node. To do this, you can use your Orbit Camera to freely move around your scene and find the perfect angle. Once you’ve done that, you can make a new Camera node, right click on it, find Camera options at the bottom, and then select Set to Current View:
This will then take all the transforms from the orbit camera that you’ve been interactively moving around and will write them directly onto the camera. This makes it really easy to grab a bunch of great camera angles and commit them directly to different cameras that you can recall later as you need.
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TouchDesigner Drag-n-Drop Custom Parameters
Building a control interface for the tools and areas of your TouchDesigner project is a great thing to do. I always recommend doing this with custom parameters. This allows you to create something like an API for your components that everything else in your project uses to control that effect or feature. This makes for much more bug-resilient projects because you won’t have tons of scripts from all over the project reaching into and tickling any operators. When making custom parameters for these uses, it doesn’t take anything more than a quick drag and drop into the Component Editor window.
In this case, you can pick any parameter, left click and drag it into the Parameter area of the Component Editor and it’ll automatically copy the name, parameter type, and allow you to set the new custom parameter as the Bind Master, which means that any values written to the custom parameter make their way down to where they need to go.
Quick and easy, no mess or fuss. You can use this not only when you’re exposing parameters of your TouchDesigner networks, but it’s also incredible useful when it comes to exposing the parameters of your imported Notch Blocks. It’s a trick you won’t be soon forgetting!
Wrap up
We hope you enjoyed our week-long live stream event of building a virtual game show with Armin from Notch. It was a lot of fun for us to plan and work with the Notch team to make this happen. I had a great time connecting with our viewers in our Twitch and YouTube chats, answering questions, and overall exploring a quickly booming world of virtual productions and live streams. If you missed any of the streams, check out our YouTube page for recordings:
