TouchEngine for Unreal Engine

Hello,
I have noticed this post on twitter from June and was wondering what exactly is TouchEngine for UE? I haven’t seen any mention about this level of integration into UE on the forums so I was kind of surprised to see it on twitter. However I am very interested in using it. Is it possible to get some more information on how it works, what are the core concepts and what is the state of development? Thanks.

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It’s very close to being ready to be shared as version 1.0. It’s an Unreal Component that loads a .tox file into the unreal application (running in a different process). You can set and get values to the running .tox using simple blueprint blocks, as well as parameters on the Unreal Component.

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Will it be possible to share textures too? I’ve been doing this with their new TextureShare plugin.

Yep, CHOPs DATs and TOPs are supported currently

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This sounds amazing, thank you very much for info and for doing this integration. I was hoping to see something that would allow for more robust TD → UE control and this seems to exactly hit the spot :slight_smile:

May I ask whether this would be available in standard commercial license, or the pro will be needed?

I am also curious how does the texture sharing works in case of TextureShare vs TouchEngine plugins? Do both of them use Spout, or is it something else under the hood? Could textures be shared between two GPUs?

Based on what was written in UE 4.26 release notes it seems that TextureShare has some advanced synchronization mechanisms. Is something similar incorporated into TouchEngine texture sharing?

TextureShare is a new plugin that efficiently sends and receives GPU textures and buffers between Unreal Engine and any other process while bypassing the CPU. TextureShare supports synchronization mechanisms and thread barriers so that coherency is kept between shared applications. You can use this feature through nDisplay or standalone.

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Any GPU->GPU texture sharing with DirectX uses the same underlaying mechanism. So Spout, Texture Share and TouchEngine all do the same basic thing underneath. Currently it requires a Commercial license, not a Pro license.

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Cool, thanks for info. I will be looking forward to using this :slightly_smiling_face:

also looking forward to this one.

wish we could also do it the other way around, i.e. embed unreal as a render engine into TD. Ventuz just did this via an epic megagrant. And vvvv has Stride. But that should be a separate RFE

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Very excited for this development!

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This would be also super cool, but I guess it wouldn’t be easy in terms of development.

I’m not a touchdesigner wiz but i am a long time Unreal C++ developer and we are currently in the research phase for a project. In fact that’s how i came into contact with touchdesigner in the first place, so excuse me if this is something known to everyone already but is there a development release or similar where one could try out what you have so far or even contribute on the Unreal side of things?

Not yet, but very very soon I hope. I’ll be posting updates in this thread

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This dope guys, :clap:

Do you need any beta testers :smiley:

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Looking foward to this! I’m a Touch user who has just got some megagrant money… very interested in using something like TouchEngine on the project

We’ll be showing a live demo of this at our inSession today:

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Hello everyone !

11 days since inSession, and we have a public beta available for everyone to try… right now !

To get started, here are a few useful links:

Official 10k (dev build): TouchDesigner 2021.14010

Documentation, must-read - extensive documentation linked in page and on Github:
https://docs.derivative.ca/TouchEngine-UE4_Unreal_Engine_Plugin

Release packages:
Samples: Release TouchEngine-UE4 Plugin Samples v0.9.1 (BETA) · TouchDesigner/TouchEngine-UE-Samples · GitHub
Plugin (required): Release TouchEngine-UE4 v0.9.1 (BETA) · TouchDesigner/TouchEngine-UE · GitHub

If you encounter issues, have questions or requests for improvements… etc please let us know on GitHub (especially for issues) or here!

Many thanks in advance for all feedback, and please show us what you create with this UE4 Plugin! :slight_smile:

Have fun,
Michel

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: TouchEngine Plugin for Unreal Engine - Beta Release

For questions and support, or any feedback, please use TouchEngine Plugin for Unreal Engine - Beta Release