I’m trying to organize my Touch designer project folder. I notice that Touch creates a certain amount of folders by default, and also that when you hit save, Touch creates an incremented version of my file by adding a “.1” to my file name.
Is it safe to create an additional folder with my .toe files? Or do they need to stay at the root of the project folder?
Any tidiness suggestions most welcome
Thanks
Alex
You can move them where ever you like, but there are some things to look out for.
$TOUCH is a built-in variable often used in projects to point to the root of the project. $TOUCH is actually the path to folder the .toe file resides in, so if you move your toe files into a subfolder, then you can’t use $TOUCH.
For example:
C:/Projectname/myfile.toe
C:/Projectname/images/myimage.jpg
$TOUCH = C:/Projectname/ and you can access your images using $TOUCH/images/myimage.jpg and these paths will update automatically if you move the project to another location.
But if you use
C:/Projectname/toefiles/myfile.toe
then $TOUCH = C:/Projectname/toefiles/ and you can not use $TOUCH to access your images folder.
You can also create your own variables, but they will need to be updated when you move your project to a different location/drive/computer etc.
You can still use the $TOUCH variable, you just need to modify where it’s used to look up one directory now:
$TOUCH/images/myimage.jpg
needs to be replaced with
$TOUCH/…/images/myimage.jpg
It’s probably less desirable to organize it this way though. You typically want to be ignorant of things that are Up the directory tree, even though in this example it’s still ‘inside’ your project. But ultimately you are in control of your project’s organization, so do whatever makes sense to you.
In Houdini there is handy variable called $JOB. I tend to send it in the environment variables for the version of Houdini I’m running, so that any session will know where $JOB goes. It makes things easier for a group of people to keep things in the same folder etc…
If I wanted to create the equivalent in Touch, would I be able to create such a variable in a way that it would span across multiple sessions?
Thanks
Alex
As far as I understand it, what you’re describing would be classified as a System Variable, which are simply Windows Environment Variables. See here: derivative.ca/wiki077/index. … =Variables
There are also Root Variables, which are global within a toe, but do not persist across toe files.
So it seems each project could either define it’s own root variables, or you could standardize all your toe projects to reference a set of system variables that you externally define and maintain.
Exactly what eerock said! 