Hi !
Is there any book about TouchDesigner on the market ? I can’t find any.
Does anyone knowledgeable feel like writing a couple help books (that could surely sell) ?
I’ve thought about it.
I made a few tutorials back in the day (for workshops and help files) but never made proper PDF files for most.
They’re outdated by now.
I think it could be really great to have a comprehensive source for beginners,
but at this point the market is fairly limited.
So anything done would probably have to be E-book only.
They’re very time consuming to make, and the information tends to get outdated quickly,
so I’ll don’t think I will go that route.
However, the other day I started building a .toe for a beginner video tutorial that I hope I have time to get around to.
It’s based on the classic “textured tube”.
Live manipulation of a tube’s shape, texture, and transparency (textures/transparency created with ramps, realtime rendered animation, microphone, and input camera) as virtual camera and lights move through the tube.
Then building the controls for it.
I have other ideas as well.
Also want to do an advanced one on “Pattern recognition”.
Sorry to be a tease…
but maybe they’ll happen.
Jim
Great, that’s exactly the type of tutorials I’m looking for and which seem useful for learning.
Please do let us know how it goes.
I find it quite hard to learn from the Wiki, and it seems like there were more tutorials available with older versions of Touch. The videos available today are great of course, it’s just that IMHO a regular book would both ease the learning curve for beginners, and might help spread the software if some publisher was interested.
I noticed there are indeed frequent versions updates that can make a book quickly (partially) obsolete, but maybe with the help of Derivative crew that could match with a future stable official release ?..
Are there still any plans for a regular manual or is the Wiki considered sufficient in itself ?
The wiki is the manual, but it’s always getting more information. If you point out things that it’s not explaining well we’d be happy to put more information in the wiki to make it more clear.
I propose an ‘adopt-an-OP’ campaign inviting the community to make example .toes and .toxes demonstrating the uuse of each available operator in the touch universe.
I know Imran has made a start on this but it’s probably something that the crowd can build up. these can be quicker to do than a full-blown tutorial with video and pdfs etc.
I also propose a ‘half-baked’ area for unfinished projects that explore an idea or technique. We make lots of these but don’t share them until we get around to tidying them up for the shared .toes section of the forum - and then we never get around to it.
notice that discussions in the beginners section are often started by people who have been using Touch for seven years or more. 
Rod.
I’ve been using touch for just under a year now so I’m relatively new but can now find my way around the software and know which ops to use with ease. The key areas were the wiki (with its tutorials) and the inside touch designer videos on vimeo for me. There were 3 to 4 of us learning too and helping each other in a group which was really helpful too.
Whats lacking in terms of tutorials are very basic examples. Right now most of the videos are overviews of project files showing the nodes and what they do or an explanation of an operator. It would be great to have a video creating something from scratch explaining every aspect of the creation process going through.
I’m hoping to do a video or two going through that as we’re using touch for a module at uni and it’ll help the younger students. Best to get it out of the way whilst I can freshly remember the things that are difficult for a beginner. It’s always worth keeping an eye on vimeo and the groups there to see what appears (thats where I’ll be putting any videos I make myself)
Richard
What I’ve found about trying to educate folks in CG is that it’s best to try to have an engaging project that gets the person creating with loads of visual examples.
While a complete overview of how something works is useful,
I’ve seen too many tutorials (in general) that spend endless amounts of time talking about interface, customization of interface, and basic fundamentals, while ignoring the context of creativity.
People are smart, and if they have interactive visual references, then they tend to learn faster than having to overly conceptualize structure early on.
Being creatively engaged helps bridge the gaps of understanding of the conceptual.
While it would be great to have a tutorial for beginners that explains in detail the structure of the operators sets, the eyes can glaze over if this is the first tutorial that newbies are exposed to.
Example: Touch is fundamentally a nodal based creative environment for accessing and converting raw data into visual and sonic output in real-time . The method of creation is based upon hierarchical structures of operators with inputs and outputs that manipulate…
Ahhhhhh shoot me now!
Sorry.
A think a better approach for beginners might be something like this:
-
Hit the Tab key, and don’t worry about what all these things are yet. We’ll start to explain that later.
-
Navigate to Sops, and this is where your 3D objects are stored, along with tools to alter and animate those objects. We’re going to place a sphere, which is hollow, kinda like an eggshell. That’s how objects work here. It’s hollow. It’s what is known as Surface Geometry. You can see in the window display that there is a sphere there. Got it?
-
Now we’re going to make this puppy move up and down. Hit the tab button on you keyboard, and place a timing chop, and pull down and make it a sin wave. Don’t worry, I’ll explain in detail the options later. Now let’s look here… what does this sideways S mean, and how is going to make your geometry move? Well you can think of this line, or rather curve, as the movement of this ball over time. The curve goes up, the the sphere moves up. It moves down the sphere will move down.
-
Explain how to Export Chops, and then double the rate. Then change the bpm.
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Put a movie on the sucker.
From there, you continue to draw the user in with creative fun.
Then, you can explain the workings more throughly after they have made some connection to the software.
I feel many tutorials are like a bad pick up line at the bar.
“So you’re here to find a prospect to have sex with. Well me too. I am well educated in the art of love making and can readily switch to almost any sexual position.”
While this might interest a sexual expert who wants to get down to business, an unexperienced person might slap you, or be left scratching their head.
The person at the bar might be into having sex, but they wanna dance first. They also might have no idea what the positions you are listing out actually are.
Dance with them first, take them through some positions at the right time, and then share info later that can make the experience more mutually pleasurable.
That’s my take.
The Wiki is great, but can be difficult to comprehend at times due to its nature of being isolated text that is a repository of info that has to serve all level of users. I think the Copy sop page is a great example of a more effective page due to the example files it contains.
I think all the video tutorials for Touch are great,
but even the most basic ones (of the ones I’ve watched) still suffer from a presumption of preexisting education of some form in CG.
Only saw one written tutorial that didn’t, and that was made back when Touch first came out in like 2001.
That said, the communication to a CG virgin didn’t seem to be the goal these other tutorials.
It’s hard to have the mindset of a CG virgin, to relate to a CG virgin, when you’re an old dog CG hoe.
Maybe I should just shut-up and make some tutorials.
BTW: I am all for operator specific examples. Like in the copy sop, or like in that program that tries to be like Touch… Houdini I think it’s call 
Jim
Thats exactly the issue Jim. Last year when we were all learning the software that was the biggest wall we hit upon. There are one or two videos like that for touch but I wouldn’t really say they were suitable for beginners, more so for intermediate users. (some of us learning at uni last year looked at them and were completely confused within a few minutes)
I will definitely try and create some tutorials when I have time over this week and the next.
I think Jim should probably write the book, “Touch Designer for Dummies - the Kama Sutra of real time digital art” or some such silliness.
I really like Rod’s idea of the ‘half-baked’ area, I have so many of these along with a number of them that have become my initial templates for new projects or experiments. These building block sort of .toes could definitely be useful for newbies who struggle to get something working off the bat.
It is definitely a tough thing since the community is so small and so many of the users are doing black box type proprietary stuff that they can’t really share. There was and to some degree still is an air of exclusivity that I felt getting into Touch because of this. Now that I am more comfortable with it, I almost feel like some of the blundering and learning the hard way has been very useful in terms of strengthening my knowledge, but I still sympathize with someone who is struggling to learn the basics as well as best practices (which I still have much to learn about)
I guess its kind of up to the current power users as well as Derivative to decide how open and ‘easy’ things get. I don’t really see or particularly want the community to go into the full on ‘Processing model’ of people scrounging the forums for ‘code’ so they can pull things off without really knowing what they are doing. But on the other hand a more exclusive feeling community means the whole thing grows a bit slower.
I’m pretty new, don’t know many of you and am pretty ignorant about the history of this discussion so far, so please forgive anything stupid I may have to say. This discourse is very important though! Also, I don’t think I should be writing any books or tutorials as I am way too long winded and tend to talk in circles about how I feel ignorant about not being experienced and how I talk in circles about not knowing exactly what I’m talking about and how… hee hee But i love sitting down with people and explaining the workflows and capabilities!
there’s my twenty cents for now…
-peter
Just to clarify. The remark about Jim’s writing the book on TD and its silly titles was fully meant as a compliment to Jim’s concise, and clear example of a possible tutorial as well as his hilarious analogy to most tutorials and bad pickup tactics at a bar. I really do think Jim is probably one of the most qualified to ‘write the book’, though from what everyone’s been saying a book seems to clearly not be the entire answer.
Learning something like touch is hard to pin down.
When I taught composition (music) to 3rd years at uni, I didn’t get anywhere until I remembered what a teacher had said to me, that music isn’t taught, it’s caught.
After that, I decided not to treat it as a body of knowledge but as a virus, and that my role as a teacher was to open up vectors for infection. then, quite magical things started to happen.
That said, I think this kind of skill-set is something that, although it can’t really be taught, it can be learned and different people pick it up in different ways.
THe touch curriculum discussions here and on the wiki touch on this I think.
for me, I learn best when getting together with other touch artists (pretty hard now I’m living in Tasmania!) and messing about. Not having that, other projects form the forum are great.
I also promise to make some tutorials. The trick there is to just do little ones that give abasic idea - otherwise you’ll never get around to it (“I just want to put text annotaions on the video and edit it a bit better etc. etc. etc.”) - just make something simple.
rod.
[url]http://vimeo.com/15850663[/url]
This is my attempt at going through a very simple practical example…I do waffle a bit but do let me know comments and criticism as I can always do a re-recording with less waffle and more relevant material.
The screen recorders frame rate is not the best either. I think I’ll record from a camera next time.
Very nice, lots of good tips concepts in there.
hey what screen recorder are you using richard?
I just downloaded the microsoft one for win7 but have not really tried it with touch. nor do I know if it can record voice at the same time. I’m assuming that it can.
Rod.
I’ve been using something called debut video capture software. I’ve just been using the lite version which is limited but it does the job. I think I might do the next ones with my 550d on my tabletop tripod though.
I have just started using one called ‘screen recorder’. I think it’s by someone at microsoft…
[url]Utility Spotlight: Screenrecorder | Microsoft Learn
It has no configuration options but it seems to try to get the best resolution and file-size. Saves as a .wmv file.
I use loiloscope [url]http://loilo.tv/[/url] for editing It’s got a groovy zoomy interface like touch and I find I can work realy fast with it and use the GPU to render. costs less than $100.
they also have a touchscreen optimized version.
Cheers for those links.
I’ll try that screen recorder out and see if I can get more fps. To be honest I think anything I use would beat that debut software.