Replicators and Texture Instancing on Mac TD 0.99

Beginners
1

Hi,

I’m just getting into Touch Designer and have managed to read in a csv file and create replicants for each row, were a certain cell dictates the size of a circle and I’ve even managed to use a python function to map that cell number so I can colour each circle according to that cell via some HSV to RGB conversion.

Which is all fine, but now I’m struggling to take all that and actually render it out. From what I’ve seen I would use a Geometry and specify a texture instance something like item[1-23] but as soon as I do that it tells me it’s only supported on Windows!

So my question is have I reached an impasse in using the Mac version or is there another way to render replicated instances?

Thanks.

2

You can use the Texture 3D TOP to load your images into a 2D Texture Array. Then you can use the ‘w’ texture coordinate on your geometry to select which slice of the 2D Texture Array you want per instance. This is more work to setup than texture instancing unfortunately, but it seems unlikely macOS will add support for it currently.

3

Thanks Malcolm that’s great. After posting I realised the replicants were actually rendering anyway so all I had to do was use a transform to lay each one out correctly. Not sure how this works as I’m not choosing any background op in the parent container but it does!

I’ll give what you suggest a try - thanks for the reply.