How to maximize 2D TOP render quality

Beginners
1

Hey all!

I’m relatively new to Touch and have a question about the quality of the rendering output. I’m currently playing with an easy TOP network to create imagery. The quality of the image is sometimes a bit low and lines can be jagged.

My question is, is it possible to get really high fidelity 2D imagery in Touch, or do you need other software to get to this level (e.g. Houdini, Octane etc.)?

I know some ways to improve the quality, adding operators like edges and blur to create definition and blur things out. I just want to know if there are good ways, common practices to level up my game! Or maybe this is beyond the capabilities for touch?

I included an example here of what Im making.

explo_liquid_refikstyle008
explo_liquid_refikstyle0081280×720 78.6 KB

2

Hey, welcome to the forum.
I guess you already know the most basic remedies against jagged lines, such as using a much higher render resolution and applying higher antialias in the Render TOP.

Hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer how to make a better look, as every scene is so different.
Some suggestions to look into are using PBR Materials, Substance Designer materials (using a Substance TOP), Environment Light, Lighting in general, and using PostFX like SSAO, depth of field blur, Luma Blur, Bloom etc. Search forum or https://alltd.org with these keywords for tutorials.

In regards to your question if you can reach same perfection as Octane/Houdini output, it’s comparing apples to oranges, as TouchDesigner is a real-time 3d engine. So you can’t really compare something that renders at 60fps to a pathtracer engine which can take minutes to render a single frame :smirk: But many people use both in their pipeline - where you import content made in Houdini into TD, and then make it interactive by rendering it realtime in TD.

3

Hey Idzard,

Thank you very much for your response.

I would definitely not assume I know anything that would be basic for you. So, if you could lay out some basic remedies I would love to hear them, I guess there would be something new there for me for sure.

Thanks for the other recommendations, I will dive deeper in each of those.

Regarding the comparison, yes, you are totally right. I’m still figuring out what pipeline would work best, and at the same time I’m figuring out what output I exactly want. A bit chicken and the egg story.

Many thanks again!