TouchDesigner progress
I have been learning TouchDesigner for approx. 3 weeks. I’ll be quite honest—there’s one word for this experience:
HUMBLING.
:) But that’s okay. I actually enjoy feeling the exact spot in my brain where new synapses are growing and getting stronger. It’s not a headache, it’s new neural highways, and that’s some metal shit.
I want to share my first attempt at TouchDesigner. Below is a video that shows different shapes synced to music. The purpose of this project was to get comfortable with the TD UI, test out switch TOPs and keyboard CHOPS and change some parameters. I restarted 3 times. I ended up working til the last minute and stayed up so late. I had a moment of “will I actually have anything to submit for this assignment?'“ because for a hot minute there, the likelihood of finishing was quickly diminishing. BUT, I finished something. Was it beautiful? No. Was it my best work? Sadly, yes haha for my experience level and patience level for the night, yep that was my absolute best. Was I still disappointed? Totes. Here it is:
Not the most brilliant thing in the world. But it’s a start.
And this week, much perseverance. Many resilience. Lots humbled still.
Our second project related to memories and their tendency to fade over time. I wanted to create something in the aesthetic of “touchdesigner” with black and white and particles. Also, I wanted to incorporate actual photographs from my childhood of my grandparents since I miss them a whole lot.
Concept:
Shifting between pictures
Using particles
Hover effect so particles accumulate and concentrate where the mouse is
Why?
This seemed to represent my feeling of nostalgia and fleeting memories. I feel like the more I try to remember memories, things get a little fuzzy. This is depicted by the mouse movements. The mouse represents my attention or focus on one aspect of the picture, and the more I focus, the more blurry and fuzzy it becomes due to the concentration of particles. Here’s what I got:
I’m really proud of this because I put in the work this week to improve from last’s weeks submission. I believe I spent about 12 hours on this. I restarted 3 times. The second attempt, I ended up messing up the file so much that it actually froze touchdesigner. LOL. I still have that file open on my computer right now and I can’t edit it, can’t save it, and can’t even close it. That’s how bad I messed it up haha
I see that each time I start from scratch, things seem to get easier. I’m starting to create some muscle memory associated with high frequency operators. Here are some operators I used for this project:
Switch TOP
Moviein TOPS
Keyboard in > Logic > Fan > Null
Grid SOP
Particle SOP
Feedback loop
Audio dev in
Mouse in > math
Point sprite MAT
Here are some resources I used:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nI8V7XZ7yk (watercolors)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzLc8IBX5KA (keyboard in)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYyzK7_rLJg (mouse particle tracking)
