Long-time houdini user, recent touch designer adoptee. I’m having a bit of an issue with making my transition to touch designer - I struggle with what I would find fairly simple thing in Houdini. I’m looking to create some histograms of each pixel over a number of frames (other things as well, but if I know the ‘correct’ way to do a histogram, pretty sure I can solve the others). In Houdini I would do this with VEX.
Buuuut, I know I’m in touch and well touch doesn’t have VEX, I image LLVM’s don’t lend themselves well to realtime. I am curious though what is the ‘correct’ or maybe more appropriately, what is the most efficient (or elegant) way of doing something like this in touchdesigner? I’m sure that there are, like in houdini a plethora of ways of going about it. I’m interested in hearing about them all and people’s reasons for doing it the way they would.
Hey, I am a long time Houdini user and Touch is a little different, instead of Vex, you just use openGL, so you write or copy shaders for certain things. There is a histogram component that you can look at. Also, you have Chops, which is a little different than they are in Houdini, and in many ways fill in for VOPS for certain things.
Check out the top to chop, and sop to chop, if you drag an image on a top to chop, look what you get, curve data that represents RGB Values, if you drag a geo on a sop to chop, you get positional data, or normals, or Cd, or whatever attribute you got. This of this as kinda like putting it in Vops land, as you can now manipulate that data, like Vops and output new data. Also, attributes from Houdini carry over so you can write out a bhclassic, and that data comes through. This can be a little confusing coming from Houdini.
As far as a for loop, it all depends on what you want to do but there is feedback, which is a loop in Chops and Tops but you can also loop in python or write your own shader or whatnot.
Hope this helps, Touch makes you a better Houdini artist, and Houdini makes you a better Touch artist but it is a headbanger for sure…