Today we’re happy to announce the release of 2025 Experimental! This release is the culmination of years of work and the exciting introduction of a new operator family in TouchDesigner - Point Operators aka POPs.
The new Point Operator Family - POPs
While we have hundreds of new features this year, let’s focus on POPs, the highlight of this release.
POPs are an operator family for creating and modifying 3D geometry entirely on the GPU. This offers new levels of performance for real-time 3D in TouchDesigner that was not possible with CPU-based SOPs used previously. The data for POPs all starts as points with attributes, and from points we can work with particle systems, point clouds, polygons, lines, spline curves, and any 3D geometrical shape and form of data points.
To get you started, we have collected a brain dump of essential POPs information here in Learning About POPs. This is the start of the POP documentation to be expanded in the coming months.
A collection of POPs sample files can be downloaded here. There you’ll find Overview.toe, a useful reference which takes you through many of the core features of POPs. For a more visual journey through the new operators, check out the examples in the POPGuide folder. plus other files made by several TouchDesigner community members. (OP Snippets are coming soon, as are tutorials, stay tuned for those.)
Highlights
The best place for a review of what’s new is in the Release Notes.
Here’s a punch list of notable highlights to look into:
- New DMX workflows in POPs
- Most TOPs now process 3D textures
- Laser CHOP overhaul - a dev-collaboration with LaserAnimation Sollinger
- ST2110 support in 2 new TOPs
- ZED camera overhaul and new SDK
- Python autocomplete and help in VS Code
- Python tools including a new Python Thread Manager and Python Environment Manager
- Metadata support for movie and audio files
- Pattern Matching overhaul
- H264/H265 encoding on macOS
Roadmap
We know you’ll want to use these new features in your work as soon as possible, so we’d like to mention some notes on our roadmap this year. We are aiming for this Experimental branch to become 2025 Official by early fall, hopefully in September. You can expect updates to experimental builds every few weeks as we’ll try to address bugs and issues as fast as you can report them. We’ve decided to not include some new features in development in this Experimental so we can get POPs into a production-ready Official version as soon as possible. A couple of those upcoming major features are an ASCII file-format option for TouchDesigner project and tox files, a new cloning overhaul, and new workflows for custom parameters. These features will be released in a follow-up experimental release after this current Experimental branch goes Official in the fall.
New to Experimental Builds?
We haven’t had an experimental release in about a year and a half, so some of you may be wondering what Experimental builds are? These builds serve as beta releases of new features for the community to explore, test, and give their feedback and suggestions on. These builds are NOT production ready and will have a number of bugs, unfinished developments, and no guarantees that features will not change before Official. As such, we do not recommend using experimental builds for delivering projects. Experimental builds are a soft launch, there is more documentation, educational content, examples, feature completion and polish coming for the Official launch later this year.
There’s hundreds of new features and improvements detailed in the Release Notes, so please head over there the full list of what’s new.
REMINDER - Experimental builds are a work in progress, full of new features but some issues too. For production-ready builds we recommend using the Official branch.
Please report any issues your find in the Bugs Forum, and we’d love to hear about which new features you’re excited about down below!
