Hi all,
here’s a link to my new TouchDesigner movie on Vimeo.
vimeo.com/9681936
If you like it, please help me promote it by passing it on (links, facebook, email) to anyone who might appreciate it.
Tip of the hat to Derivative for making the tools that allowed me to make this!
Jim
Beautiful work Jim, cosmic scale!
I love this video. Would you mind sharing some more info about what techniques you used to create it ? Is there a lot of real-time 3D, is it more like some footage mix ?..
Wellllllll…
a good magician never divulges their tricks/secrets 
That said, in the spirit of Touch/Derivative comradery, here are some.
If you make cool stuff from this info, please share the results and the secrets with me as well.
The live-action (real-world) source footage (the second half) was shot on the Red camera which has a resolution of up to 4096 x 2048.
The intended format for this film was Imax,
so that’s as about as low rez as you can get and still have Imax quality for a post production up-rez.
Working in this format was a luxury for me that I’ve never had before.
I’d work in Touch with lower rez versions of the clips, and then swap them out at render time.
BTW: Touch (or rather quicktime rendering) craps out for me at 4095x4095. Some kind of rez wall.
Still, you certainly don’t need to work in such a large format to make cool stuff,
but if you can get it, then it gives you plenty of pixel quality to zoom in and crop parts of the image.
(Didactic Tangent Tip: BTW if you need to up-rez something of lower rez, don’t try to do it in a single operator. Don’t try to go from native rez to 4x in a single resolution top. Instead raise it up gradually over a few resolution tops, with Level Tops and maybe Edge Detection tops to adjust for the blurring that happens in the up-rez.
The live-action footage looks nothing like what the final product looked like.
The source footage was real-word liquids, lights, and Cymatics.
Cymatics (check out online) being vibrational waves sent through real-world particulates of differing density.
The source of the vibration being the output of an audio synthesizer created using Wave Chops and the Oscillator Chop.
This footage (down-rezed) was then manipulated real-time in Touch.
Recursive mapping of Tops onto 3D objects to give the “flat” more depth.
Spheres with the camera zoomed out are helpful.
Tips: When creating your source footage, consider compositing operations and keying. Also consider the motion of each “element”, and how the movement along those vectors will work together. Think of each as an “ingredient” for a tasty dish you are making. Also, if you can shoot at higher FPS rates (such as now lower end Phantom Cameras) then the decreases in playback rate will make small things seem larger (the first Godzilla movie). Again, not necessary, but you may have to slow down your source footage gradually (using interpolation in the Movie Top, like with resolution adjustments) ), save it, and slow it down some more. Repeat.
Hope that helps
Jim
OMG ! Cymatics was what I was looking into right before discovering Touchdesigner !
I can see now what part of what I really liked come from.
Thanks a whole lot for your marvelous insights. You made my day !