Some general questions

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

HI everyone,

I am doing AV art in Max/Jitter & Ableton Live. I was thinking to switch to TouchDesigner and I would have few questions before I dive in. So is it possible to:

  1. send x-y-z data from mesh vertices via OSC? Or of course anything calculated from that (speed, acceleration etc.). Let’s say I have a particle system in TouchDesigner and I want to send speed data of all the particles via OSC. Is it possible?
  2. send collision data when using physics simulation via OSC?
  3. Let’s say I create some real-time AV system between Touchdesigner and Live. And at some point in time (let’s say 10 second), Touchdesigner generates a MIDI note and an OSC message that gets sent to Live. When I do the offline render - would it be possible to somehow count the time (by knowing inside TouchDesigner the current frame that is beeing rendered) and then generate the desired MIDI note and OSC message with the “time code” attached to it. So When the render would be finished I would have the video and some “text file” saying at frame X (=10s) MIDI note “M” and OSC message “O” was generated?

Your answer is much appreciated!

2

in short: yes, that’s all possible!
I think it’s actually a lot easier in TD than in max/Jitter.

3

Thanks a lot hrtlacek! That is a totally awesome answer:)

One more thing. Are all these things doable by using the visual programming language of TouchDesigner or would I need to have a knowledge of some other programming languages (Python, Javascript, GLSL, …) that are maybe somehow embedded in TouchDesigner?

Thanks many times!

4

Try the Record CHOP and Lookup CHOP if you want to render the video a second time. In addition to the Ableton Sync project from Derivative, something called livegrabber [url]http://showsync.info/tools/livegrabber/[/url] has worked well for me.

5

I guess you can achieve all of that without text programming.
that being said, the border to text programming is a lot thinner in td than in max (you can use python expressions in parameters. Its like coding inside max’s inspector)

if you know some python and or glsl you will achieve tidier, more efficient and more flexible results.