Hi I’m [slowly] wrapping my brain around touch designer with the intention of playing around with it for artistic projection mapping.
Anyways I’ve come up against something that might be super simple but I can’t figure it out.
I have a MIDI controller and I’m mapping out various sliders and knobs to Touch parameters. Everything is going fine but now I want to export my MIDI slider CHOP to the period of a Ramp and it gets choppy. Erase the chop and it goes back to being smooth. I’ve even tried by creating a constant and exporting the chop value from the constant and I have the same problem.
I’ve uploaded my file. It’s probably more complicated than it should be but I’m just getting started. Of course if you’re swimming through it and see that I’m being very counterproductive with my techniques I would love to hear your advice. I would eventually like to get into more complicated texture mapping but I figure I’ll start with the easy stuff like ramps and colors.
Your ramps are bound to jump when your period changes. The only thing I think of is putting a Filter CHOP before the period is exported to the Ramp TOP. That will ease the discontinuity.
However you have a possibly better solution in the .toe you uploaded. You are using LFO CHOPs and driving their Frequency with the slider. I added a Trail CHOP to the LFO and followed it with a CHOP to TOP and Resolution TOP. That gives you a completely smooth transition in frequency and phase, a little different, and you will have to adjust the parameters to get your desired spatial frequency (vs temporal frequency). Anyway, to see it, adjust the Pre-Add of math10 if you don’t have MIDI attached. 3surfacemaracubetest.2.toe (1.45 MB)
OK well for starters thank you for your awesome reply I learned a few things that I can hopefully apply to some other issues I’ve been having. I love how there are so many ways to do the similar things in this software! I guess the only issue I have with using the resolution top as a gradient is that I couldn’t figure out how to color it or how to change it into a circular or radial effect similar to what you can do on a ramp.
Second, I think I didn’t state my question correctly, well I wasn’t worried about the hiccups in the animation while changing the period, instead it was that as soon as I connected the chop it would get screwed up, and then as soon as I removed the exported chop it would go back to being smooth. Through playing with your methods it turns out that this was because upon removing the chop the period would revert back to 0.25 which is one of just a few periods that sync up ok.
So I figured I’d come back here to post a minute finding (which might be super obvious to everyone else but wasn’t to me).
Periods will be continuous and smooth when they are the result of dividing 1 by an integer. Not necessary for me to go too deep… but I have found that 0.125, 0.1667, 0.25, 0.3333, and 0.5 are all smoothly transitioning periods. FWIW.
Thanks again for the help! I’m sure I’ll be back shortly for more as I explore this crazy software a little deeper.