Touchdesigner(derivative.ca)
derivative.ca
Touchdesigner
https://derivative.ca/
7 comments
The best way I think I can describe it for this audience is if Unix command line programs are a box of tools for processing text, then
Touchdesigner is a box of tools for visuals. At its most basic, you can give it video input - a file or a webcam, and do something to it, and then output it back out. to a file, to the screen, out an auxiliary HDMI port. "Something" is ill-defined, because it can do whatever you can manage to program to the input. Crop it to one corner, turn it black and white, and then put colored lines it so it looks like sprinkles on a cake. Whatever. So where it shines is for non traditional outputs - mostly LED art sculptures, lasers, and projection mapped works of art. But it can do more than that, you can build GUIs with it, and if you've ever seen a mall kiosk, or a photo booth on a Hollywood red carpet, or just seen some cool LED visuals at a club, chances are, it was built with TouchDesigner.
It's a proprietary package, with an expensive runtime, and its save files are inscrutable binary blobs. But that's my ideological OSS developer side speaking. It's used all over the entertainment industry because of how powerful it is as a box of tools. The vendor (derivative.ca) even has a jobs page, to help people who know this program find paying gigs.
TouchDesigner can make GUI applications, but distributing those applications as applications is expensive because you need to license their runtime, which isn't cheap. So it's very limited on the number of installs, even if it is the Excel of video creatives.
If it helps, the other package in the general area is Resolume, which is much more of a packaged app for VJs, to TouchDesigner's bag of tools. If you've been to a concert recently, chances are Resolume is what drove the visuals.
It's a proprietary package, with an expensive runtime, and its save files are inscrutable binary blobs. But that's my ideological OSS developer side speaking. It's used all over the entertainment industry because of how powerful it is as a box of tools. The vendor (derivative.ca) even has a jobs page, to help people who know this program find paying gigs.
TouchDesigner can make GUI applications, but distributing those applications as applications is expensive because you need to license their runtime, which isn't cheap. So it's very limited on the number of installs, even if it is the Excel of video creatives.
If it helps, the other package in the general area is Resolume, which is much more of a packaged app for VJs, to TouchDesigner's bag of tools. If you've been to a concert recently, chances are Resolume is what drove the visuals.
Wikipedia is my go-to for these cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TouchDesigner
> a node based visual programming language for real time interactive multimedia content, developed by the Toronto-based company Derivative. It's been used by artists, programmers, creative coders, software designers, and performers to create performances, installations, and fixed media works
> a node based visual programming language for real time interactive multimedia content, developed by the Toronto-based company Derivative. It's been used by artists, programmers, creative coders, software designers, and performers to create performances, installations, and fixed media works
[deleted]
It is worth noting that Touch Designer was forked from Houdini 4.1 by Greg Hermanovic, one of the SideFX (https://www.sidefx.com/) founders.
Touchdesigner let me hook up a 3D camera to a 3D model so participants' movements moved an onscreen character, while also listening for events from a USB-MIDI keyboard and mixing the incoming note events using realtime external streams from the internet
all in a couple weeks using pretty much Python and a drag-n-drop interface!
all in a couple weeks using pretty much Python and a drag-n-drop interface!
Someone told me about this last night. What are the best communities of users?
Maybe "Touch Designer is a flexible projecting mapping tool that can be used to build complex visual effects and interactions"
But that's possibly wrong, because I couldn't quickly get the full scope!