FR: First-class layer map editor

Wishlist and RFEs
1

I’d like to use touch designer as a sort of photoshop-like image processor. With touch designer it’s super easy to get creative and create nondestructive filters. However one pain point is when it comes to trying to apply affects to only specific areas in specific amounts…

You can do this now with a pretty painstaking process:

  • Add a Compostite TOP
  • Render out the pre-filtered image
  • Render out the effected image
  • In a photo editor draw an outline of where you want the filter to apply. Render that selection out
  • Import the selection image and pass it into the comp TOP combined with the filtered chain
  • Comp the filtered chain in a second compTOP

I’d love to see first-class support for this workflow. I’m thinking main features to support it would be:

  • A simple paint tool to create the layer maps
  • Potentially add layer map as a common tab in all TOPs so you don’t need the chain of comps
2

It seems like you’d want to look into matteTOP for masking photoshop style.
And for drawing/painting something in, it is doable by making a custom component, like discussed here.

TD being quite low-level focused toolkit, I doubt that native support for drawing masks onto each TOP would be the way to go. At most, perhaps it can be requested to include one of these community created drawing comps into the official palete.