So I’m writing this as a complete beginner because I probably won’t care later.
I’ll be blunt too: The First Things To Know tutorial is boring to the point of being an insult. Why do I have to know these itty-bitty details about dragging, clicking and the importance of a three button mouse before anything else?
I don’t think I’m alone in just wanting smth to show me, as quickly as possible, how to take some input, make something interesting to it, and then output it?
It’s not that the tips aren’t useful. It’s just presented in a way that doesn’t speak to a beginner’s needs. I know Ableton Live, After Effects, VDMX, Photoshop etc etc, and guides for all of those will answer questions that an actual beginner might have when starting out their first project. Telling us all the various ways to use a mouse isn’t that.
End then it goes on to explain loads of details about operators etc that I don’t need (yet). I’m ditching it at point 13 or so because I’m just so frickin bored. Maybe there are people who made it through all of it, but I think there are few who use it as an actual ‘First Things’ guide w/o resorting to other tutorials out there.
Which, incidentally, I’d like some pointers to. Thanks!
There are plenty of “just make something” style tutorials in youtube and patreon land. Derivative themselves have put decades of work into making the environment something that is incredibly intricate, open ended, and informative so the details of the interface become extremely important if you get deep into TD. The journey into TouchDesigner usage is a bit more like learning a programming language or development environment in some ways, than some of the more single purpose apps you mentioned.
Because of this open ended-ness, it is a bit more difficult to have comparable tutorials one might find for those sorts of apps because there are far more various usages of TD. The first thing you may want to do is focus your search on what it is you want to accomplish. Interactive dance visuals? Standalone generative installation management? Pretty particles? 3D Scene rendering? Robot control? VR? Projection mapping? VJ systems? Simulations? Audio visualizer? All of these start in pretty different places in the Touch ecosystem.
The way the community has evolved has often led to the faster paced tutorials and guides for specific topics being handled by top users in those sub-disciplines. This is why many of Derivative’s own guides and tutorials stay more in the “how to use the interface” sort of category.
All that being said, if you’re in it for the versatility and breadth of what TD is capable of then the “boring” ground work ends up being useful, though many often don’t come to the boring parts until they’ve found their “ice-breaker” use case and realize they want to know more.
thank you for your feedback. Always helpful to hear about the experience from our community when approaching TouchDesigner as a novice.
As a few pointers, have a look at the many tutorials categorized on the website
Lot’s of these are straight up beginner tutorials.
Yet for more base knowledge - essentially understanding the why of TouchDesigner, check out our curriculum at
In a collection of short videos, the fundamentals of TouchDesigner are explained and build up a understanding of the software which allows for going much deeper on specific topics of interest.
For me, it’s a combination of VJ:ing and DJ:ing so I’m looking into those tutorials too. It’s just the basic stuff that’s hard to find - things like knowing that the CHOP path in a CHOP to TOP is typed and not drag&dropped. That sort of thing; when you know it, it just becomes how you do it.