I am very new to touchdesign and I barely know what I’m doing. I have a project for uni that I’m using touchdesign for, which I’ll use the temperature of different months in the year to try and create a generative piece of art.
Here’s where I need help, I want to try and use the temperature statistics to create a piece of work which shows different temperature patterns. The main idea I had for this was to create an animation of a circle on td and have it vibrate/move based on the different temperature statistics. I have searched everywhere to see if I could do this but I haven’t been able to find anything.
when getting started with TouchDesigner it’s important to familiarize yourself with the underlying concepts. This will help for you to approach an idea by analyzing what the inputs are and how to use them to get to the desired outputs.
Our curriculum at leran.derivative.ca will be a helpful first step.
As next steps I would suggest breaking down your idea:
in what shape is the temperature data? Is it a spreadsheet and you might be able to look at it as a table with a Table DAT? Or is it realtime data? Look in the documentation at docs.derivative.ca what fileformats TouchDesigner supports and how you might be able to access the data you have.
how does the vibration and movement look like? Maybe it’s similar to animating a circle to some audio? In the end an audio signal might not be so much different from temperature data - it’s just values along a timeline…
check out the many youtube videos for visualization of data and just think of time based data as some abstract thing: it could be temperature, or amount of pigeons per neighborhood over the course of a year, or amplitude of a song. With this you might find that the concepts are similar: take the data, often massage the data a bit to fit your visualization needs (filter, or re-range values) and then use the data played back over time (check out CHOPs) to animate the radius of a circle.