TouchDesigner Operators Explained

General summary

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.

Instructor

Matthew Ragan

What’s included?

• Over 5 hours of HD video
• TouchDesigner 099 project files and examples

Workshop objectives

• Understand functions and classes in Python
• Learn how to use list comprehensions in TouchDesigner
• Deploy Python Storage inside of TouchDesigner
• Build extensions in TouchDesigner to build your own components
• Build a powerful and flexible preset systems using extensions
• Learn about dependencies, properties, and attributes of extensions

Pre-requisites

• Basic knowledge of TouchDesigner
• Basic-to-Intermediate Python in TouchDesigner

General summary

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. .

What’s included?

• Over 2 hours of HD video
• Templates of TouchDesigner projects created in the training

Workshop objectives

• Understand how the Widget system works
• Learn to control the parameters and values of widgets
• Re-scale widget values
• Learn to build a simple UI with widgets
• Discover Bindings and how they work with Widgets
• Create an advanced UI with multiple pages of buttons, sliders, and fields
• Add Material Designer and unicode icons to your Widget UI
• Understand the updating system built into widgets
• Learn to automatically generate a Widget UI for your components

Pre-requisites

• None!

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:

• With hundreds of operators rendering on a single network, your computer will slow to a crawl.
• The messier your project architecture is, the harder it is to collaborate. Eventually, working with a team becomes impossible. Even working alone, keeping everything straight in your head becomes a recipe for disaster.
• Finally, your project is far more likely to break when you update it. This is because everything is coupled together (more on this later).

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:

• Dramatically shorten your development cycles. By reducing complexity in your project architecture, you eliminate unnecessary steps in the development process. And because you’ve created an intuitive working environment, the tasks that remain get done exponentially quicker. Shorter development cycles let you adapt to client demands, as well as take on more advanced – and better paying – gigs.
• Collaborate effectively. Once projects get bigger, a simplified architecture like mine is the only way to work with a team. And effective collaboration is a requirement for anyone looking to work long-term professionally with TouchDesigner.
• Never refactor again. When I first started with TouchDesigner, I would sometimes spend days rebuilding my projects. With my current project architecture, I never have to refactor – and neither will you.

We accomplish this through my 3 core project architecture concepts:

• Standardize: This is part of what enables effective collaboration, which is necessary if you want to create complex, large-scale installations. When you standardize your project architectures, you speed up your development cycle while also minimizing the chances of introducing bugs into your workflow.
• Compartmentalize: By isolating nodes and features into compartments, we can introduce logic into our workflow. This reduces the need to refactor projects down the road, makes it easier to optimize nodes and wires, and promotes the re-use of specific components (i.e. logger, movie player), which dramatically reduces development time.
• Decouple: The cornerstone of collaboration, decoupling lets us separate our functionality from our controls. This enables you to create multiple user interfaces so teams can work on different things in the same project. Without decoupling, any number of issues can occur. Someone could add, rename or change something without the others knowing, creating a chain of bugs down the line. Decoupling also results in far less refactoring of code is necessary.

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:

• You need some basic Python coding ability to integrate external data sources with TouchDesigner. If you’re like most artists working with TouchDesigner, your coding skills are limited.
• Figuring out how to integrate data natively in TouchDesigner is particularly challenging. While you can find python tutorials that teach you how to get API data, they don’t show you how to get it to work for your TouchDesigner projects.

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:

• Setup your Python programming environment within TouchDesigner.
• Look at two sample projects, one using the GitHub API and one using the Twitter API.
• Walk through how to register, get credentials, and read API documentation. This can be a daunting process and typically deters newcomers.
• Get answers to common problems, such as how to work with Big Data without experiencing performance issues.
• Receive 2 project file templates that you can use in your projects however you like.

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:

• The undocumented nVidia Quadro driver tuning settings. I learned these directly from the source: NVidia and Derivative. These settings have helped me avoid disaster many, many times.
• How to ensure you purchase the right hardware for an installation. Mistakes here can cost anywhere from $2k-$50k+, not to mention the damage to your reputation.
• How to setup your TouchDesigner projects for perfect playback BEFORE problems arise. We want to eliminate tearing, stuttering or judder – the main causes of a failed installation – before they occur.
• A deeper understanding of VSYNC, hertz, FPS so that you understand how to identify and troubleshoot the causes of tearing, stuttering, and judder, should they happen to your installation.
• How to configure windows 7 and 10 for optimal performance, so that your project runs at a high, stable frame rate.

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:

1. Workflows that should be simple become bloated and tedious. Anyone who has tried to composite a large number of icons on screen when working on info displays has experienced this first-hand..
2. Performance issues such as low framerate become unmanageable, requiring time-consuming workarounds. In some cases, these kinds of technical issues become unresolvable.

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:

• How to create operators in TouchDesigner using GLSL. Once you learn how to do this, you can customize TouchDesigner however you like. This is the knowledge required to overcome the problems faced when trying to scale your projects
• Never programmed C – let alone GLSL Shaders – a day in your life? No worries. I start right from the beginning and assume zero knowledge of either language. We’ll cover common terms, best-practices, and basic setup before diving into practical examples in 2D.
• I walk you through everything necessary to begin importing GPU code from Shadertoy.com. This gives you access to thousands of shaders that you can use for inspiration or in your installations.
• I provide you with 9 of example project file templates. The techniques in these templates have made me thousands of dollars and are the result of years of trial and error.

General summary

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.

What’s included?

• 2.5 hours of HD video
• TouchDesigner 099 project files and examples

Workshop objectives

• Learn about TouchDesigner’s pull-based cooking
• Learn how to use Performance monitor
• Learn how to use Probe
• Diagnose CPU bottlenecks
• Diagnose GPU bottlenecks
• Diagnose hard drive bottlenecks

Pre-requisites

• Intermediate knowledge of TouchDesigner
• Basic of Python scripting in TouchDesigner

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:

• Optimize UI elements for performance and speed: Poor UIs take a lot of computing power, slowing down your projects and messing up your rendering. This is bad. I teach you how to avoid it by optimizing your interfaces correctly.
• Skin your UI so that it looks great: When creating a UI, you need to know which objects and operators within them are performing which functions. If you don’t, you’re essentially working within a black box. I show you how to get out of the box so you can customize your UI however you like, with ease.
• Control your UI over a network: As many know, it’s common practice in TouchDesigner installations to have a single computer performing most of the processing-intensive tasks. Most designers host their UI on this main computer, which can tax it further and result in rendering issues. I show you how to get your UI off this computer and onto another one, so that it doesn’t take up the computing power of your main rig.
• Override UI controls: This is how you use your UI with external controllers. While not initially intuitive, once you know how to do it the process is relatively straightforward. As discussed above, external controllers are often a critical component in interactive installations.

A great TouchDesigner installation needs a great user interface. Get the training you need to provide professional UI for top clients today.

Summary

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.

What’s included?

• 2.5 hours of HD video
• TouchDesigner 099 project files and examples

Workshop objectives

• How to use Replicator COMP callbacks
• Advanced control flow in Python
• Intermediate Python tricks in TouchDesigner
• How to run scripts and delay script execution
• Useful built-in Python libraries
• Adding 3rd party Python libraries

Pre-requisites

• Basic understand of Python in TouchDesigner
• Highly recommended to have completed Python Introduction in TouchDesigner training

Summary

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.

What’s included?

• 2 hours and 50 minutes of HD video
• TouchDesigner 099 project files and examples

Workshop objectives

• Learn the basis of Python (data types, variables, etc)
• What is Object oriented programming?
• How to reference and control operators with Python
• How to make Python expressions
• Introduction to Python control flow
• Common Python errors
• Creating Python triggers

Pre-requisites

• None!

Summary

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.

What’s included?

• 1 hour and 45 minutes of HD video

Workshop objectives

• Learn tricks that improve your workflow
• Learn TouchDesigner functionality you wish you knew
• Learn shortcuts to the most common functionality
• Includes TOP tricks, CHOP tricks, SOP tricks, and COMP tricks

Pre-requisites

• None!

Want to level up your TouchDesigner skills and create dynamic 3D installations with interactive elements that can scale from single to multi-touch and virtual reality – all without changing anything about your setup?

Are you still trying to use 2D interactive hotspots and invisible UIs in your 3D TouchDesigner installations?

If this sounds like you, I’ve got good news and bad news.

The good news is that you’re not alone – this is how most designers start out (even some experts get away with it). It actually works okay if your 3D installations are static and the interactions are simple.

The bad news is you’re going to miss out on rich, dynamic and complex 3D projects. Anyone who has tried to create dynamic interactive 3D elements using invisible 2D UI hotspots to trigger interactivity has seen this firsthand.

Fortunately, TouchDesigner lets us use render picking to integrate 3D interactivity directly into our projects:

• We can create complex 3D scenes that can be transformed dynamically without sacrificing or continuously re-calibrating interactivity.
• We can also scale our 3D installations for unlimited multi-touch points without ANY adjustments to code.
• TouchDesigner enables us to build virtual reality experiences and render picking allows you to create 3D UI’s and interactions in VR.

But render picking isn’t easy. It requires unintuitive Python scripting techniques. And to implement effectively, render picking assumes a deep understanding of TouchDesigner and the connection between instancing and multichannel manipulation of data.

It’s with this in mind that I created the “How to Create Multi-Touch 3D Installations Using Render Picking” training. In this training, I teach how you how to use Python to build native 3D interactivity directly into your 3D TouchDesigner installations.

In this training, you will learn:

• How to create interactivity for multi-touch systems. Using Python, we can setup a scene that enables unlimited interactivity – as many touch points as we want. This training assumes familiarity with Python, and is therefore intended for intermediate to advanced TouchDesigner users.
• The practical difference between 2D interactivity with 3D interactivity, so that you understand the difference between the limitations of 2D interactive hotspots – and the limitlessness of 3D.
• How to save time by eliminating the need to build 2D invisible UI’s and hotspots into your 3D projects.
• Intermediate Python techniques required for render picking. These include iteration (for loops), basic understanding of classes, and scripting in TouchDesigner.
• How to optimize render picking setups.

The best is that I’m offering “How to Create Multi-Touch 3D Installations Using Render Picking” for $125.

Note: this training is the same content as the previous “3D Interactivity with Render Picking” training, but it has been upgraded and re-recorded. If you already bought that one, you already have access to this new one!.