Ready to get started with the deep 2D/3D media environment TouchDesigner? Or you’re an educator teaching others? Or you just want one newbie-friendly tutorial for Fluffy the Noise? It’s all here.
First, the big announcement. Derivative, the developers of TouchDesigner, have worked with SudoMagic to make a complete educational resource to working with the visual/audiovisual dataflow environment. And this works largely with the non-commercial license, meaning it’s accessible to all.
They’ve got a full 80 units of materials, structured as complete lessons, with tutorial videos and reference and example files you can download. Not only is this unprecedented for TouchDesigner, but I don’t know of a many other comparable environments with educational guides this deep. (Max probably is the only one that has anything equivalent, and even there I don’t have a single-point link I can point to.)
It’s all available at learn.derivative.ca.
They’re also inviting contributors from the community. (I’d love to see an open license on this, too, while they’re at it, since community contributions are part of the notion!)
What’s great about this, as Derivative themselves say, is that you get the fundamentals as a complement to all the community-built stuff. So just as The Interactive and Immersive HQ, The Node Institute, and allTD.org cover the latest-and-greatest things, you have this single learn site to get started.
They’ve done a beautiful job getting you started: a set of lessons you work through to get all the essentials, each with short videos of 5-8 minutes and written overviews and downloads. And that’s obviously useful to folks learning, folks teaching, and folks teaching who are also learning or folks learning who want to teach others.
There’s even a tutorial on the curriculum:
This seems transformative to me for the whole environment and community. It also assists those with community and paid products, because it gives a better platform for folks to start, and a better pipeline from educational environments and other communities. I hope actually a few other environments in music and visuals take notice.
It’s so good, and so complete, that I actually want to chase it with one new community-made tutorial just to give you a starting point. So “BB” DeRe has a nice beginner-friendly, tiny network called “Fluffy the Noise” to get your appetite going for the full learning resource. Big congrats to them on their first tutorial. I just hit like and subscribe, like 2013-style.
And yes, going back to basics will absolutely help you to understand today’s other story so you don’t get lost. Now I just wish Unreal Engine, for all the good documentation out there, had something this focused on fundamentals.