Maybe this isn’t the right place for this question/discussion but I was hoping to get some insight from folks with a bit more experience and time in touchdesigner. How do you start to move away from the beginner/messing around following tutorials phase into being able to conceptualize and create projects from scratch? How did you start learning and what do you wish you could have done differently? Is it worth it to pay for a course or would you recommend to continue learning solo from online resources? How do you go from following other people’s workflows to creating your own?
No need to answer each question, just hoping to spark some conversation and gain insights from folks who’ve been working on their craft for a while and want to share with a beginner. Thanks!
My own journey got a huge boost taking a two day paid course at derivative. Then I took a bunch of smaller ones on Music Hackspace (all of them still available I think online - quite reasonable) on specific topics like instancing, audio reactive, ableton, kinect etc. I also joined HQ pro for a couple years but that gets expensive. YouTube tutorials are great and I use them all the time but I think a solid course or two is well worth it if you can swing the cost.
What works best for me with YouTube tutorials is to search and watch one while I am on the treadmill, just to understand, then the same day try to build it step by step myself and add my own comments as I go to help remember things later. I constantly reuse code from even years ago - and you can build your own palette components for easy reuse.
I highly recommend doing the Learning lessons free on derivative - and I do mean doing, not just watching. And there are tons of great tutorials by Matthew Ragan and Bileam Tschepe that were super helpful to me. I also support gurus on Patreon who make toxes with GLSL and Python etc beyond my skill sets but I would not do that until you have exhausted most of the free resources as those monthly subscriptions add up.
I hope this helps you. TD is so much fun you will learn tons from just building stuff constantly!
Thanks for the reply! I’ll definitely check out the lessons from Derivative. I didn’t realize they offered full courses like that online. And definitely agree with you on Matthew Ragan and Bileam Tschepe’s videos, I’ve been working off their tutorials.
Good tip too about watching a tutorial and trying to recreate it later on from memory. I’ll have to give that a try.
There’s plenty of shortcuts, courses, examples and tutorials these days. Certainly a few things regarding best practices that are wise to know before you end up re-inventing the wheel.
That said, there’s still quite a bit of value in thinking of a goal, and trudging through trying to figure things out towards that goal. A lot of the nitty gritty detail work of specific artistic needs can only be sorted through trying out various methods, getting to a point of breaking/not working and starting again with a new foundation!
Much of my initial learning was done through trying to make audio reactive visual accompaniments to music tracks. Blending data reactivity with linear animation. If you have a visual idea and want to see it happen in front of you and are driven in that sort of way, its a pretty fun way top practice, and you often end up employing and devising methodologies that may serve in other types of work down the line. Since music is so structured, cyclical and rhythmic you end up coming up with patterns and re-usable snippets, modularizing and organizing your components, similar to how you might construct a narrative interactive piece.
I’m still a beginner in touchdesigner, but I had the some ponderings for progression and creative development.
I’ve found that finding patreon accounts with longer form/more advanced videos have been very helpful to develop my skills and comprehension in the software.
Touchdesigner is a really neat software with a million ways to make something magical happen. It really rewards exploration and experimentation, even if you know little of its depths.
Also, walk around your world, take photos, and ask yourself what happens if I put this into TD?
