TouchDesigner Video Tutorials

You can now find all our TouchDesigner tutorials in the wiki:

docs.derivative.ca/Category:Tutorials

I can’t seem to find any in-depth tutorials about modelling in touch. in particular i want to create a swept surface. ie draw some splines path and cross section and then sweep the cross section along the path spline and be able to animate this of course. however even how to make a spline is not detailed that i can see. what it is is detailed but no tutorials on how to actually make one seem to exist. any suggestions?

hi,
I also find it pretty hard to get into modeling inside touch. A big help is to go the houdini route leading to touch. The houdini guys have a lot of tutorials on procedural modeling you can more or less directly translate to TD. Hope that helps a bit,
cheers

Thanks for the tip. luckily i have Houdini experience. its the idiosynracisties of touch that elude me…
i have figured out that you can use the SOP editor as a modeller on any ? SOP rather than there being a model SOP as you might expect. you cant save the geometry from the SOP editor as you get an error every time. you have to save the geometry from the SOP that you are editing itself.
so i have a simple sweep sop working now but i cant figure out why the transform sop is not updating on the cross section input that goes into the sweep. the joys of touch!! why it doesn’t just work out of the box i dont know…

I see, but it’s not that bad really.
Consider posting an example if you have problems, the community is great here. There is a model SOP and I guass it would be wise to use the modeler with this SOP abut don’t mention the modeler/editor, it’s a magic word. Just ignore it for the time being, it will save you a lot of time. (There is no undo for example) Or use it for really simple things only.

thanks so much for your prompt response. yes indeed there is a model sop now i have turned on ALL rather than BASIC. take so long to get back up to speed with touch if you leave it for a while… my fault. ok im making progress but what i want to do is make a spline patch using cross section and path . i seem to have made a polygonal one but cant seem to figure out how to make a spline one. is this done in the sweep sop? or must i make splines in the model sop to sweep? using the sop editor i could only figure out how to make poly lines… my little modelling thing attached (except i cant see how to attach anything, guess ill send a link to a file)… i want to animate a texture image along the resultant ribbon like surface.
any suggestions appreciated…
by quitting and restarting the toe i got the transform sop to update in real time. a bug?

,y humble attempt here…

mega.co.nz/#!Ng8ihJ6T!SSNjMRcLL … DIEF_PH6DA

Does this help? Using NURBs circle to sweep around the backbone and then used a Skin SOP. Results in a NURBs surface.

You won’t get far with the SOP Editor in the Model SOP, most of the states there have been removed or aren’t currently supported. The SOPs themselves are still very capable and excellent for procedural modeling, but be careful if animating SOPs as they are very CPU intensive.

Most modeling work in TouchDesigner projects is done in other packages and then imported using FBX. We know there are a lot of limitations with the 3D modeling in TouchDesigner, but with our resources we are focusing on the unique realtime features of TouchDesigner instead of the modeler where other 3D packages are more capable.
sweep.tox (742 Bytes)

Hi thanks for that. So the sweep sop does not create a patch nurbs or bslines?
I’m not sure if I understand the distinction between the sop editor and the model sop. Is there some way to model in the model sop other than using the sop editor?
I understand using an external package for complex models that are not animation the modelling over time. However I would expect basic curve modelling sweeps etc to work in touch…
Most of my attraction to it is the animatable procedural modelling… Combined with realtime environment…

The SOP Editor will let you edit any SOP (including the Model SOP) by locking it. The Model SOP is just an empty SOP for editing in. I was just saying that the SOP Editor will not get you far.
And unfortunately even basic curves can be challenging to create in the SOP Editor. Its an RFE that has been logged for a while, we’ll take your interest as a +1. :smiley:

Sorry, I forgot about the Output page of the of the Sweep SOP. Yes, if you look at the example I posted and change Skin Output parameter to On, then the Sweep SOP will create a NURBs surface for you and the Skin SOP is not required.

Hi there,

First of all let me thank you for all the documentation and for the software. im a multimedia artist, starting to learn touchdesigner.
Im following some of the video documentation from the several workshops.
I don’t know if it is possible, but i saw some imagens from the Japanese workshop with Shuhei Matsuyama, and it looked incredible. Lots of compositions with geometry and audio reactivity :wink:

Is it possible for us to see some video documentation of those?

Best Regards

a question regarding most of the video tutorials: i would love to download eg. the norway videos so i could watch them offline but it seems, these can only be seen online on derivative’s pages (eg. here derivative.ca/Education/Best … Videos088/). on vimeo (where they are hosted), they seem to be set to private/hidden. or actually some are, others aren’t, seems quite random.
is this just an accident or is this intentional? because it really makes getting into this much harder if you don’t have highspeed internet everywhere…

Sorry that is not intentional, in fact I am not sure how you could download the one I found “Introduction to TOPs” that is downloadable. If it is just a flag I will check and see if we can make it the same for all.

However, unfortunately our hosting with Vimeo will come to an end soon. All our current and new videos we post are now on our Youtube channel here:
youtube.com/channel/UCbgFCf … /playlists

You’ll find the Norway videos there as well.

Figured it out, so for the Norway Workshop and SF Workshop videos you can now view them on Vimeo and download them.
derivative.ca/Education/Bes … Videos088/

awesome, thank you!!!