FragTool

tempting me to buy a new laptop, have to spend it on that pesky food stuff though.

GTX260m went straight to terminal black-screen. can’t fight progress.

a GTX970 for the old desktop is probably on the cards very soon though… :slight_smile:

thanks for sharing.

Rod.

Sorry to hear that Rod. Yeah I don’t think a 260M will do so well…

Just uploaded a new version that has some of the lightest settings possible when loaded. It’s almost holding on 60 fps on a 780M on my laptop.

Pretty much looking at minimum 780M or 680 desktop GPU. Otherwise it won’t be very useful. Either way it’s more of production tool than a realtime tool. It’s possible to run some decent formulas at 60 - 30 fps at 720p but it’s pretty limited.

I thought of something last night though. When I have some time I’ll make a tile rendering mode that will only render a portion of the image every frame. It might take 16 frames to get the full image but at least this way the computer and the UI are still usable while it’s updating.

Keith,
publish video that shows how to use it, you will get lots of feedback that way.
I have tested it even with this machine :
passmark.com/baselines/V8/di … 4057650344
its works fine and look good( ~22 fps)

This thing looks insanely awesome; however, I’m not sure where to start … Preset morphing huh ? You should look at the Reaktor 5 community for inspiration ( if you haven’t done so already ) they are masters of set parameter blending.

I went to make a video tutorial for you guys but found out how many things I broke doing some updates to the UI. So ended up fixing things, I’ve posted a new version where a number of animation, mod, camera and timeline functions are fixed.

Definitely try and get tutorial made asap for you guys although I might have to break it up into a few. The video I recorded was 80 minutes and still hadn’t really covered quite a bit of it…

Yeah the preset morphing isn’t actually the best name for that function although it does have a similar effect in the end to morphing. It basically sets a bunch of animation keys of various presets in the animation comps so. That way you can make a number of presets that you like then convert them into one animation that can then be edited. Not sure where it’s at I didn’t get a chance to test it tonight. I’ll make sure it’s running well for the tutorials though. I should change the name and then implement the Reactor style parameter morph(I did know about that as well). I actually have two plans one is to make the realtime morph and to make an output preset grabber. When you do a bunch of animations and mods you might get moment where things look really good and you want to save that particular state without the animation and mods driving it.

I really need to do a major overhaul of the preset system first though. It’s kind of old school storing a bunch of DATs of everything - parameters, mod settings, animation values etc… which adds up to bunch of tables per preset and makes it difficult to deal with. Once I get the preset system up to date with some of my newer techniques I’ll do some improvements to the morphing and other features which will be much easier to do.

Animation seems to be fixed though. Create or select a static form, then press K on one of sliders. The slider is now relative the current animation value. Drag the slider up or down and either let go or press shift to set a keyframe. Press shift can still be a little jumpy but letting go is very smooth. It should work everywhere.

If anyone finds any bugs please let me know.

cheers
Keith

Just uploaded a new version with a few fixes and improvements.

I’ve added a few notes to the bottom of the first post.

cheers
Keith

Now the fun begins ! Got it now, thanks so much…

Wow, just seeing this for the first time now. Thanks so much for sharing this, Keith!

Getting 30 - 60fps on my 970ti. Great stuff Kieth this is an amazing piece of art / expression.

Thanks guys.

Btw it looks like it’s a bit broken in the new experimental builds >40000 . I’ll post a fixed version soon.

cheers
Keith

Finally got a chance to play with this on a decent computer. Awesome stuff mate!

Wow, this looks like a totally powerful tool!

I started exploring fractal stuff beginning of 2015. Disappointed with built software for fractals visualization I quickly moved to GLSL and wandered across a range of tools including Fragmentarium and Synthclipse. These are great tools but always limiting in what I wanna achieve.

Looks like moving to Touch and starting with FragTool is the beginning of a new chapter.
Particulary given that I wanted to move to more real-time stuff integrated with external sensors/inputs.

Motivated to learn.

Dear all,

I am learning how to use Fragtool, and would like to use my MIDI controller (Novation Launchcontrol XL) to modulate the parameters of this amazing Fragtool system. Could anyone explain to me or help me find out how to map a midi controller signal to any formula in the perform-mode of the Fragtool UI, so I can modulate parameters by twisting knowbs on my midi-controller?

Thank you so much and I hope to hear from you guys!

Fred

Hi Fred, it’s not setup but there are a couple of methods you can use.

In /FragTool/Anim_LFOs_Mods/ are a number of animation components for each parameter group (formula, camera etc.). If you insert an override in front of the CHOP labelled “out” in any of these sections you can override a parameter. This will work but you might find you’ll have a number of problems if you want to switch formulas - parameters that you had mapped may not exist anymore.

The best way to get midi controllers in would be to setup a number of controllers as modulation sources.

In /FragTool/Anim_LFOs_Mods/allModRouting you’ll need to update a table called “AllMods” with the channel names of the midi channels you want to map. Then in the same container merge your midi channels into the CHOP labeled “mods”

Now your midi channels will show up as mod sources in the Mod Matrix Source menus and you’ll be able to route the to any parameter. When a global preset is stored it will save the routing.

Hi Keith, first great work and thank you for sharing.

As a newb, please forgive my ignorance, but did you ever end up posting any docs or videos on how to use the great FragTool? I haven’t been able to find anything.

So far, i’m just trying to move the camera, set some keys and see some animation…

any help appreciated!

-j

jsunandmax, OK, first, I’m a noob. Been into Touchdesigner < 1day. Here ONLY because of discovering Fragtool yesterday, which may be the realization of a 20 year dream if I can get my head around it. For the benefit of other noobs (and you, if you haven’t figure this out), a couple of preliminaries:

  1. The Fragtool UI wants a 1920x806 monitor. Less than that and the parts of the ui you need for animation are truncated off the right edge. Do this:
    Open the .toe file in TD.
    Hit ESC to enter Edit Mode.
    Hit the ‘U’ key to move to top of the object hierarchy.
    Click the Win module to highlight it.
    On the right you’ll see the parameters (Window/Extension/Common tabs).
    On the Window tab, from the Size dropdown, select custom and set your display resolution. Hit the F1 key to return to Performance Mode.
    On my system (1600x1200), I now see the missing panels on the right side.

  2. I needed to set my audio device:
    ESC to return to Edit Mode.
    ‘U’ key to get to top of hierarchy. if you aren’t there.
    Select the large ‘FragTool’ container in the center of the screen. Hit the ‘i’ key to enter it.
    Select the ‘Anim_LFOs_Mods’ base on the lower right. Hit the ‘i’ key to enter it.
    Select the larger Audio container at the left of the screen. Hit the ‘i’ key to enter it.
    Select the audioout CHOP on the right.
    In it’s Parameters, select your correct Driver & Device from the dropdowns.

IMPORTANT! If you are using a crappy, stock audio interface (i.e. non-ASIO), you WILL need to increase the buffer size. This WILL increase latency and may result in a delay between graphics/sound. Start w/ .600 on the Buffer Length, if you get no sound later, come back to this step & increase. Now set the ‘Active’ switch to ‘On’. Don’t touch anything else for now.
‘F1’ to return to Performance Mode

  1. Now you’re ready to make it do something :slight_smile:.
    Spacebar toggles timeline play. Make sure it’s running.
    Click the ModMatrix radio button on the extreme right of the ui, about an inch down from the top on a 21" monitor. This is where good stuff happens. There’s a Mod1Gain slider near the top of the left column in this pane. Move it just a touch to the right. On my system, the fractal is now animating a little, to the beat of LFO1, which is the default source for this modulator, just above the slider.

  2. Let’s try some audio:
    Click the ‘Open Audio’ button on the top right, under the FragTool text.
    May need to click it twice, mines a little flaky. Opens a dialog.
    Open up a windows explorer containing a music .wav file. MP3, etc won’t work. Drag that wave file into TD, right on to that text bar with the tiny writing directly above the waveform display in the dialog you just opened. Crank up the Monitor Source slider to 1. You should see the wave display active. If you bring up the Monitor Volume slider, you should hear music. If not, you may need to increase that buffer.

Go back to the ModMatrix on the right. In the top left modulation source, ‘Mod1’, select Audio1 from the dropdown. Your fractal should be doing something musical at this point.
Play around with the ‘Dest’ dropdown just to the right. A lot of these choices don’t seem to do anything, others are drastic.

HAVE FUN :wink:

Now you know what I know. I hope you guys will post cool stuff here as you discover it. It might be up to us to document this thing.

Be certain that Keith has given us something beyond amazing here. I’ve popped the hood, and this thing is scary complex inside. The possibilities of customization & tweaking are endless. This is literally the tool that some of us have been dreaming of since we did our first Mandelbrot zoom on an 8-bit computer 30 years ago. As for me, I’m buying a faster video card on Friday, lol. But right now I’m gonna go buy myself a beer :wink:

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*********************** EDIT **************************
The issue described below is resolved by uninstalling the current TD and re-installing v088.32840

Thanks Keith! :slight_smile:


If anyone besides myself is playing with Fragtool, or would be willing to spend 10 minutes verifying something for me, please try this:

Load the .toe from the first post in this thread. Note that on the left, the Formula tab is selected by default. The current formula is ‘TryptaIFSMulti’. There are about 33 formula paramters listed in my install.

Go to the formula dropdown at the top of that list.

Select any other formula, but for example, I used the one at the top of the list ‘CornerMenger’.

Now there are only 15 formula parameters.

Go back and select ‘TryptaIFSMulti’ again from the dropdown list. Now there are only 17 paramaters displayed. The only way I can get the entire 33 params back on my install is a reload of TD.

I can’t imagine this is the designed behavior, since those parameters are critical to do anything original w/ this.

Thanks for any help.

Hi ForestCat. Please install teh last Touch build before build 40000. This should alleviate your problems. I plan on doing a major upgrade but it probably won’t be posted for a bit.

I was also thinking of doing a live tutorial if anyone is interested. If so let me know and I get start to organize a time.

cheers
Keith

That fixed it. I edited my post. Thank you! re: tutorial, sign me up :wink: Anybody else?

Keith, one thing: Is there functionality within the ui somewhere to direct the render window output to another monitor? If not is it simply a matter of finding the right component and adding a window component to it? If so, could you provide the path to the right component? This ui is deeeeeeeeep, lol. I know you’ve got some scaling/res stuff going on, I wasn’t able to find the right thing to send to a window.
Thanks!