Hello.
First of all, i don’t want to be misunderstood and hope not to insult anybody.
My question is, where does the difference between the abilities of Touchdesigner (which i consider kind of state-of-the-art compared to jitter eg.) and recent computer games or non-realtime 3d rendering programs come from?
I mean, yes of course there is a LOT of money in the development of 3d studio Max or any mainstream PC game. And i am not even able to write my own shaders, so i am convinced that i could get a lot more out of TD. But it seems that some things are so simple to create in Houdini, 3d Studio Max and so on, which i can not find in TD or Jitter (soft shadows, smoke, fire, all kind of physics, different lightning settings, what else…) is this just because they are too performance hungry to run in realtime anyways?
So what about computer games? (amazing things happening there…in realtime [?])
I am sure i miss some fundamental understanding of the differences.
Thanks for any explanations!
cheers
EDIT> i would really consider the answer “You just have to learn a lot about shaders and in general” a very motivating one, if the difference is just the person(s) who are working with the tools not about the tools, which is maybe the whole point of my question.
The difference between TD and something like Max or Houdini is the performance. What can be done offline on a CPU is very different than what can be done real-time on the GPU.
When comparing to video games it’s mostly just how much time we have to make easy to use rendering techniques. Games are full of little hacks and tricks to get the effects they get so it’s hard for us to make general solutions that incorporate these types of tricks in any scene setup. That being said since we give you access to the shading language, you can create shaders that do the same thing as video games.
So yes, learn how to program shaders and you can do so much more.
searching ‘shadow’ on the forum and on the wiki might dig up some more.
unfortunately this bbs used for the forum doesn’t let you search for “has:attachment” like you might in gmail for example (I miss th eold mailing list, it was a treasure trove!)
it would be great to just collect every shader in one place to download them all.
thanks rodberry for the kind answer, thx for the links, i will try to approach the whole thing by tweaking those. That’s a good starting point.
But to be honest, yes, i find the mere thought of text oriented programming daunting
i actually cant understand why there isn’t some tool to write shaders in a graphical or modular environment like max or TD. (is there?)
Maybe this approach just doesn’t make a lot of sense?
for making shaders using a graphical interface, mental mill is such a thing. It costs about $500 but you can mess with it for 30 days befor it demands you get out your visa card.
these videos might show more what it does or how the workflow, uh, flows… mentalimages.com/products/m … ideos.html
to use in touch, you’d export as GLSL then load the shader code into DATs then you’d need to follow the wiki directions to convert it so touch is happy with the code.
I’m thinking to take the plunge with coding shaders so, if I do, I’ll try to make some tutorials as I go along.
Same for me. No Glsl programming knowledge (or any other shading language).
So I tried Mental Mill, and hope to see the magic happens…
But the code generated by Mental Mill, is very complexe. Even for a very simple shader.
A lot of tweaks to get it works, and as a novice you get lost.
I don’t even think it is a good way to learn.
I hope to get enough time soon and I will start to learn Glsl.
Maybe someone got a better experience with Mentall Mill.
Cheers.
Xavier
