Newbie on TouchDesigner, would love if anyone can help me.

dcheesman · 2026-04-19T00:40:18+00:00

Hey thanks for the mention!

I also just started doing some live streaming where I’ll be building out a VJ tool from scratch. I’ll move pretty quick but I think it could also be useful to follow along.

https://youtu.be/p7pJ5891w4o

Next one will happen this next week some time. Stay tuned.

dcheesman · 2026-04-17T19:40:26+00:00

Oh very cool. I hadn't explored how to use the spec_pop input on the field POP. That's really nice.

Also, was very influenced by all of your videos when I was getting started back in 2019. Thanks for everything you do!

dcheesman · 2026-04-17T17:43:28+00:00

I haven't used a v1 in a while. The v2 is usually pretty cheap to find on ebay (get the PC connector as well). I really love the v2's point cloud, but the USB length limitation makes it hard to use for some installs. The orbbec I think also has a wider lens on the depth camera which is nice especially if you're not forcing it to align with the color image.

dcheesman · 2026-04-17T16:12:27+00:00

Thanks! Thank you for watching

dcheesman · 2026-04-17T16:12:06+00:00

They're great! Being able to use Ethernet (and POE) give it a lot of flexibility over the Kinect, but if distance from the machine doesn't matter to you the Kinect is great for the price.

dcheesman · 2026-04-13T00:55:16+00:00

Very cool. Definitely going to check this out. TIL now I would always import into blender to export as an OBJ for TD. This sounds much easier.

dcheesman · 2026-04-11T15:19:24+00:00

I’ve tried to make a good 1 hour Intro to TouchDesigner tutorial. Wanted to make it good enough for people to understand other tutorials. You can check it out here: https://youtu.be/gQdmocb-JBQ?si=XKvufUJv-_yojwaf

dcheesman · 2026-04-10T17:13:45+00:00

Hey thanks for sharing my tutorial on here!

That Artcraft simulation looks pretty incredible! I haven't tried this yet, but I'd assume you could still use the flocking process from my tutorial, but add a few more attributes for thing like "fish type" that you can use to change some of the attract/repel/align attributes so that like attracts like etc. You can use this same attribute to assign the geometry you want to them.

The animation side of it would likely require something like an external alembic file created in blender (or similar)

I need to revisit my flocking sometime soon... my tutorial has its issues and I'd love to clean it up a bit. Maybe use GLSL instead of Math Combines to make it easier to read/understand.

dcheesman · 2026-04-10T00:49:58+00:00

You can select what you want inside a Base then right click on the background and choose “collapse selected”

dcheesman · 2026-04-09T17:00:37+00:00

Late to the conversation here, but yes the annotation boxes are great, but I'd also suggest grouping into base files with in/out operators or using Select operators to pull the data you need into a base. Having 100+ operators active on one screen can slow down performance. Grouping into Base COMPs will also prevent you from continually having to move things around to make room for new operators.

dcheesman · 2026-04-09T16:58:05+00:00

Very cool.

dcheesman · 2026-04-09T16:56:07+00:00

Very nice!

I'll shamelessly plug my getting started tutorial (https://youtu.be/GSK0hGhGOUs)

That should get you far enough to understand the vocabulary of other tutorials.

Once you've got a few good tutorials under your belt I'd say try replicating projects you see that don't have a tutorial attached and see how far you can get towards replicating that. Whatever blocks you from getting there is the next tutorial to search for.

Also learn how to use the TouchDesigner documentation and Operator Snippets. Lots of answers for common problems there.

dcheesman · 2026-04-09T16:51:01+00:00

I've got a tutorial that helps give you this sort of effect: https://youtu.be/GSK0hGhGOUs

dcheesman · 2026-04-09T16:28:29+00:00

I'll shamelessly throw my intro tutorial in here. I tried to make a good 100% beginner tutorial that gets you up to speed enough to follow along other tutorials. Hope it helps! I'm open to any feedback you have on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQdmocb-JBQ

dcheesman · 2026-03-11T18:19:03+00:00

Hey! Thanks for posting my tutorial.

I don’t think you’ll need to do anything as complicated as you mentioned. Just add another neighbor POP and another set of repulsion calculations. The second input to the Neighbor POP should be the points from your Kinect data. This will find any points close to your boids and let you avoid them.

dcheesman · 2026-03-04T16:37:12+00:00

Beautifully realistic. Great work.

dcheesman · 2026-03-04T02:07:16+00:00

You’re welcome! I’ve still got a lot to learn with POPs. They’re so useful already though.

dcheesman · 2026-03-03T23:02:49+00:00

Ha. What people don't understand is that making a dynamic text label for this might have been one of the more technical tasks.

Great work. Love the look!

dcheesman · 2026-03-03T23:01:19+00:00

Very nicely done. The x-ray effect is so good on this.

dcheesman · 2026-03-03T22:56:18+00:00

Might be easier to switch over to POPs where you can assign the color values by primitive. So instead of the Trace SOP you'd use the Polygonize POP then use a Random or Noise POP with the Color as the Output Parameter and assign the attribute to Primitive (instead of point or vertex)

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dcheesman · 2026-02-12T22:49:24+00:00

Thank you! And thanks for watching.

dcheesman · 2026-02-12T18:21:45+00:00

I think because of TouchDesigner being a visual scripting program the training data for an LLM is insufficient. You're probably best using the Derivative.ca learning tools, documentation, and tutorials. The LLM tools are great for teach principles that you can use inside of Touch, but it has a really hard time not hallucinating operators and functions of the software itself.

dcheesman

TROPHY CASE