Simple-ish Animation Question

Hello,

This may be a simpler question than I make it seem. I have been using TouchDesigner for a few days and have done 3.5 full chapters of the Lynda course plus a few other tutorials. I am stuck asking the following questions right now. I would like to do this without using Luminosity or Rogue, for the purpose of learning.

  1. I would like a movie file in TOP to be triggered by a button. The video will start its animation off-screen, only to be transformed on button press in on the X axis into the screen space, then fade out permanently until retrigger of the button. I have tried doing button TOP > select TOP > wave CHOP mapped to the parameter of the movie transform TOP, but this repeats the animation and seems highly inefficient.

  2. What is the best way to organize trigger-able animation sequences in the editor? For example, I’d like the animation to move in and fade out. Then however, I’d like it to automatically change scenes. Ideally I would have a trigger-able switching device for my multiple videos. What is the most efficient way to set this up?

Let me know if I can clarify any further!

Cheers,

Trenton (The Hand Sum Man)

It sounds like you could use the Timer CHOP to solve all of these issues. Here is a little example.

The first button triggers the timer chop to start.

The timer will show its “done” channel as 0, we can flip this and set it to the Opacity. so that it automatically hides the video when the timer is done and un-hides it when the timer is running.

Next we have a “mover” button, that causes the video to move using the ‘over’ TOP by setting the “constant_mover” value to 1

To finish it off, once the timer has finished, I am resetting the x-motion back to 0 using the Timer callbacks.

As for animations, I sort of stay away from them if I am doing more complicated scripting things. However I have done things before by scripting processes within the Animation COMP.

I would use a Timer CHOP to playback different animation timelines as “SCENES” instead of trying to do it all within one animation.

You may need to clarify your animation question further, I am confused.
exampleVideor.tox (2.6 KB)

Thanks, the timer chop and the simple chopexec script was all I need. Would you say it is common to require Python at some point in a project? I’m learning it, but could use some encouragement to keep learning since I don’t know if these things can better be done through the TD interface. It sounds like either way, Python and GLSL scripts will help make things a lot easier to connect and more efficient.

I use python pretty extensively on every project. You definitely have the most power if you start to learn more.

It’s deeply integrated with just about everything in TD. It would be pretty hard to say that anything I did in your example was actually called “python code” though, its very simple TD specific syntax.

Somethings are better in the TD interface and all things can be scripted in one way or another. It all depends on what sort of things you are doing and how that performs with your needs.

GLSL I only use for more advanced and specific needs, not typically when doing most things, you can do a whole lot with the built in ops.

That really helps me get my bearings and understand the point of all this much better, thanks!