While you’re staring at your walls, maybe it’s the perfect time to realize the kind of trippy visuals that happen in your dreams. That ranges from beginner-friendly Ableton and streaming integration to advanced physics.
Visual development tool TouchDesigner regularly includes major updates, but this one is unusually chock full of important updates.
You can stream and route video and audio between apps – in the non-commercial version. There are two pieces to this – NDI support is now free, and there’s a special video output feature that can now support major services like Twitch and YouTube.
NDI, NewTek’s cross-platform protocol for handling audiovisual feeds, just became a lot more important – because it’s what you would want to broadcast to YouTube, Zoom, Slack, Skype, Facebook, and others. NDI was already a useful power tool, but now it’s in the non-commercial version – essential while a lot of people are on suddenly limited incomes.
Here is a dead-simple guide to getting it up and running: https://derivative.ca/community-post/broadcasting-social-media-touchdesigner/62737
That’s in and out support, so possibly invaluable even if you don’t intend to stream anything.
The Video Stream Out TOP is the other side of this – RTMP support for Twitch, Mixer, YouTube, Facebook, and the like. (YouTube is a work in progress.)
There’s updated Ableton Live support. Automatic installation, the ability to bind to Ableton parameters and Macros, more support for song information and chains, and just a whole bunch of little additions and fixes are included in the latest TDAbleton. So now’s the time to work on scoring music videos or building next year’s AV show, in other words.
There’s now expanded support for NVIDIA FleX, a powerful real-time particle simulation. (pictured, top, in case you wondered what the heck that was) Nvidia says they’ve made this “artist-focused” to make it easy to mimic the dynamics of real-world cloth, bodies, rope, fluids and gases, and other effects, live. In TouchDesigner, now all of those parameters are available to perform with, live, with a physics solver built on the engine. You’ll need Windows and an NVIDIA GPU, but if you’ve got one, this puts them to real use. You can even make your own smoke monster.
Finally, you get to do what you want with fluids, just emitting them all over the place.
Okay, that came out wrong. Just check their support: https://docs.derivative.ca/Flex
More Kinect Azure support: The latest version of Microsoft’s Kinect computer vision tech was already supported in TouchDesigner, but now you can take its ability to see through our bodies and imagine skeletons (ewwww) and output to depth and color space.
Python support has been enhanced and, if you hadn’t been checking a while, is already up to Python 3.7 support.
Full release notes:
https://derivative.ca/release/202022080/62768
And downloads: