The beauty of open-ended, modular environments is the ability to create exactly what you need from the ground up, each time.
The problem with open-ended, modular environments is the need to create exactly what you need from the ground up, each time.
And that has left some readers of this site utterly baffled when opening the graphical environment TouchDesigner we mention so often.
Media artist Mary Franck got tired of creating new modules and mappings for each performance, and wanted to produce a framework that allowed her to create custom shows without having to reinvent the wheel. What she has produced is potentially a boon to the live performance community. It includes modules that cover your needs – including effects and generative visualizations, plus projection mapping via Kantan Mapper. But it’s also free and hackable, so you can modify it for your needs. Mary also teaches, and says she’s aimed her work to students as well as experienced users.
The upshot of this is, there’s now something with the power of TouchDesigner that you can use out of the box. That offers some massive possibilities for VJs and visualists who wanted to experiment but also needed a starting point. Mary describes her work to CDM:
Rouge is a live visuals platform and TouchDesigner programming framework that works out of the box for video performance and makes it simple to build and share your own TouchDesigner FX and realtime 3d compositions.
For those of you who already use TouchDesigner or have been meaning to try it out, here is a release of my own tools as a comprehensive platform, with a section specifically for generative realtime video.
And it even works with TouchPlayer.
More information and free downloads:
http://www.maryfranck.net/rouge/
About Rouge