It must be back-to-school season because there’s a superb crop of new TouchDesigner tutorials ready. Best of all, a couple of these start with real basics, which is good not only for beginners but also for refining your skills from the ground up. Get those CHOPs up.
And don’t forget that you can work through nearly all TouchDesigner content with the free, non-commercial license. (Make that demo, get a gig, then upgrade!)
In my favorite of this batch, Okamirufu has this beautiful short tutorial that gets into the fundamentals of noise. Every flavor is on tap: Perlin, simplex, sparse convolution, Hermite, harmonic summation, alligator, and random varieties. This isn’t just noise for textures, though – think 3D displacement, too. It’s a classic CG technique (back to the early days of computer graphics), but it’s silky smooth in TouchDesigner today.
While we’re hitting the classics, why not point cloud particles? Here’s Crystal showing how to work with particles and feedback (more links in the description):
PJ Visuals has a nice, modulating “glass” effect going, which also serves as an introduction to layering various effects techniques:
What happens when you combine particles and displacement? You get stuff like this, which can even animate still images:
TouchDesigner combined with AI tools was a huge boon to the experimental, critical AI lab I ran with Cibelle at SONAR+D this summer. Here’s a great introduction to how to set that up, including not just Stable Diffusion but also Teachable Machine (which is a terrific way to learn how AI training actually works even as a non-coder). You also get to check out GitHub Copilot and NVIDIA Maxine:
Oh and Blender fans, these folks have a useful-looking add-on:
Plus – don’t forget VDMX6 will now support TouchDesigner compositions.
And we have this to look forward to:
Get TouchDesigner (and full documentation) direct from the developer: