The 2025 Official build of TouchDesigner, released on October 30th, is nothing short of a game changer for TouchDesigner developers, as it includes the official introduction of Point Operators (POPs) to the program. POPs, a high performance GPU-based set of operators for creating and modifying 3D data, are poised to redefine the way you work in 3D in the software. That being said, they’re not the only exciting addition found in this release! In this post, we’ll take a look at all of the exciting new features and updates included in the 2025 TouchDesigner release.
Official Introduction of POPs
The biggest news from this release is that Point Operators (POPs) have at long last made their way into TouchDesigner’s Official branch! This introduction has been a long time coming, with the first preview of the new family appearing over a year and a half ago.
POPs are a new family of operators that run on the GPU and can create or modify 3D data. Points can be the building blocks of polygons, lines, line strips, spline curves, point clouds, particle systems, any 3D geometrical shape and any form of data points.
Because POPs utilize the GPU for their processing, new possibilities have been unlocked in the program, including the ability to have particles and point clouds with millions of points, real-time animation of complex geometry, and the ability to manipulate massive amounts of data compared to previous workflows.
One of the most powerful aspects of POPs is that they allow for working with data directly on the GPU without requiring the writing of shaders. Each POP can contain a set of point attributes, which can range from common types of data such as position, normal, color, to user-defined attributes or automatically generated/calculated values in certain operators.
With all of the new functionality that they bring, there’s a lot to learn about POPs and the POP-based workflow! Derivative have provided some resources to make the process easier, starting with documentation pages for the POP family and, crucially, OP Snippets as well! You can access OP Snippets via the Help menu, right clicking on a POP in the network editor, or right clicking on a POP in the OP Create Dialog.
Along with that, Derivative have a POP Examples file you can download here: Download POP Examples. This contains a large number of example networks showcasing the usage of POPs. Included is the extremely useful POPGuide.toe built by Darien Brito, which includes a number of great examples of many POPs, with an interface similar to OP Snippets. Also worth checking out is the Overview.toe file, which showcases many key features and concepts of POPs. Many of these examples have made their way into the OP Snippets for POPs, as mentioned above.
Finally, Derivative have a page Learning About POPs which provides a deep dive into the POPs architecture and core concepts.
Import/Export Geometry and Points
Loading your data into POPs couldn’t be easier. The File In POP can be used to load .obj files as well as .tog, .bhclassic, and .hclassic. Working with point files no longer requires the use of POPs, and the new Point File In POP can load common point cloud file formats like .obj, .ply, .fits, .exr, .xyz, .pts, .csv, and .txt. The FBX COMP, USD COMP and Alembic In POP can be used to bring those file formats into POPs (including animation).
For exporting your geometry, the new File Out POP allows you to write POP contents as a file or file sequence, including point, geometry, and scene file types. Supported file types include the Alembic Scene type, along with the OBJ, EXR, PLY, SPZ, and E57 object types.
Geometry and POP Node Viewers
The new and improved node viewer for POPs is a great tool for visualizing each point’s attributes. It includes the ability to visualize attributes as text, vectors, dots or colors, each providing a unique way of understanding the attribute’s values. Above, you can see an example of a Noise POP being used to add a 3 component random value to each point, which is then visualized as a color using the Display Attribute Colors option.
All of the display modes are accessible via the right click menu, which is a nice workflow improvement for the viewer. No more need to open the Display Options window!
Speaking of the Display Options window, it too has received some updates. A new page has been added for POP overlays, which helpfully includes options to scale up the size of the overlays, have the scale of the overlays automatically adjust based on proximity to the geometry, and crucially the ability to thin out the amount of attribute data shown. This last option is extremely useful when trying to get a handle on attributes found on geometry with densely packed points, for example.
Guides have been split out to their own page. As you can see in the image below, the grid guides have been significantly updated in their appearance in the viewer.
Aspect & Clipping settings have been merged and moved to their own page, and finally all of the marker settings for SOPs have been moved to SOP Markers.
Updates to DMX Workflows
Another area that has received some updates and improvements is TouchDesigner’s DMX functionality. Previously, DMX was exclusively handled by the DMX In and Out CHOPs, but now a series of DMX POPs have been introduced which enable powerful new workflows for any DMX fixtures.
The DMX Fixture POP lets you set up all of the DMX channels in your fixture’s profile. Each point and primitive in the DMX Fixture POP represents a copy of the fixture, which gives you a position in 3D space for every fixture in your setup. Then, the DMX Fixture POP can either automatically construct all channels and universes required to address the fixtures, or you can define a routing table, similar to those seen in the DMX CHOPs.
In the simple example above, we have two line primitives each containing three points. Each point represents a single DMX-addressable LED of a theoretical fixture. Using the routing table, we’re able to set different universe and channel start settings per primitive, allowing different settings to be applied for each line primitive.
Next up, the DMX Out POP is used to merge the data of one or more DMX Fixture POPs and send the data out to DMX, Art-Net, sACN, KiNET or FTDI devices.
The DMX Map DAT is another new addition that is great for visualizing DMX universe and channel layouts and can be a helpful tool for troubleshooting channel conflicts.
To round out the DMX category, a new Pan Tilt CHOP has been added, which makes it easier to control a fixture’s pan and tilt controls directly. Check out the OP Snippets for this operator for more!
Laser Upgrades
The Laser CHOP has received a major upgrade to its point generation process, with improvements to blanking calculations, image sharpness/uniformity, point repeating, general stability, and taking input directly from POPs. It introduces the notion of corner points and guide points, which are used to enable sharper and more defined lines, while at the same time allowing for less consumption of the laser device’s point buffer. The Laser CHOP documentation page has more info.
The Pangolin CHOP has been updated to support using POPs as an input, and the Laser Device CHOP has had its SDK updated.
See a full list of the laser-related updates here.
Stereolabs ZED Cameras
Stereolabs ZED camera support has been extended to the POP family with the addition of the ZED POP, which can be used to scan and create geometry meshes by moving it around the room or an object of interest or generate live point clouds from on-camera depth data.
Along with that, the ZED TOP and ZED CHOP have received some updates as well. Check out the full list of ZED-related updates here.
Color Space Workflows
Color Space Workflows have been added to TouchDesigner, with new settings available in the Preference Dialog for setting the working color space, window pixel format, and more. These settings are saved on a per-project basis.
See the full list of Color Space Workflow-related updates.
New TOPs
The Layer Mix TOP is a great new tool for compositing image layers and making adjustments per layer. Unlike the Composite TOP, with the Layer Mix TOP you have the ability of adjusting the crop, scale, rotation, translation, pivot, opacity, brightness, levels (black level and gamma) and composite operation independently for each layer. That’s a pretty huge update! To make things less cluttered, you have the ability to only enable the particular adjustments that you want to use.
The Render Simple TOP lets you render POP geometry directly without needing any extra operators (no Geometry COMP, Camera COMP, Light COMP, or Render TOP required!) Just point the operator to the POP you want to render, and you’ll immediately get rendered output, with control over the geometry’s position, rotation, and scale, along with various camera and light settings. You also have the ability to add a color map, render the geometry as wireframe, or specify a MAT of your own.
The NVIDIA RTX Video TOP provides NVIDIA RTX owners with access to RTX Video Super Resolution and RTX Video HDR effects to improve sharpness, clarity, and automatically convert SDR video to HDR within TouchDesigner workflows. Currently, there’s no documentation page for this operator, but it will eventually be available here: https://docs.derivative.ca/NVIDIA_RTX_Video_TOP.
3D Texture Support
3D Texture and 2D Texture Array support has been added to most TOPs, meaning that many operations can now be performed directly on the 3D texture. Here’s a list of supported TOPs:
- Add, Blur, Channel Mix, Chroma Key, Composite, Constant, Convolve, Cross, Difference, Displace, Edge, Emboss, Feedback, Flip, Function, HSV Adjust, HSV to RGB, Inside, Lens Distort, Level, Limit, Luma Blur, Luma Level, Math, Matte, Mirror, Mono, Multiply, Noise, Outside, Over, Remap, Reorder, Screen, Slope, Subtract, Reorder, Threshold, Under.
- TOP to CHOP and TOP to POP also support 3D Textures or 2D arrays.
Some operators, like the Displace TOP shown in the image above, have had their parameters updated to reflect the support for 3D textures/2D arrays. Notice how the Displace TOP now has a Z source setting, as well as Z axis settings for Source Midpoint, Displace Weight, and Offset.
Pattern Matching Updates
TouchDesigner’s Pattern Matching functionality has received a sizable update, which changes some of the previous syntax with the goal of improve consistency and clarity. At the same time, Pattern Matching Support has been improved.
See the full list of changes to Pattern Matching.
Wrap-Up
We’ve tried to give you a greatest hits of this latest release, but as you might expect with such a big update, there are many new features and changes that we weren’t able to get to! To see the full list of new features and changes, check out the official Release Notes page.
We hope that this post has given you some insight into the new features found in TouchDesigner’s 2025 release, and that you’re as excited as we are to start exploring all it has to offer!
A note on Sources
Sources for this article include the 2025.31550 Release Notes, currently found at https://docs.derivative.ca/Release_Notes, and the 2025 Official Update post by Ben Voigt.
