Is there a way to draw automations like in Ableton Live?

I was wondering if there’s a way in TD to quickly draw automations like in Ableton Live?
See file attached, it took me less than 1 minute to draw that automation, and I could change it quickly any time.

I am trying to automate 3x sliders over a timeline and I am having trouble finding a visual / intuitive way in TD.

I appreciate any help in pointing me in the right direction!

In TD you can place an Animation COMP. If you rightclick that node and select ‘Edit Animation’ you’ll enter the Animation Editor in which you can draw keyframe animation channels.

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Ok, thanks for that.

I have been reading the documentation and been experimenting a bit, I am getting some results but I am having trouble to set the animation length that i need.

I would like to know how set a specific length to an animation.
I have tried using the Time Component, but not very successfully.

What I am trying to achieve, is having an animation approximately 45 mins long. This animation is “listening” to a LTC timecode I am receiving.
i.e. if the LTC rewinds to a specific point, the animation steps to that point and runs from there.

I think I got the LTC part sort of there-ish, but not sure how to set the animation length at this point.

On the first page of the parameters of the Animation COMP, you can set the Play Mode.
By default it’s set to ‘Locked to Timeline’, in your case I would use ‘Use Input Index’.
Below that you can set what the input index will be, a simple 0 to 1 float (fraction) or maybe in frames of seconds, whatever fits your setup best.

On the second page ‘Range’ you can set the Type to custom, and the start to 0 and the end for instance to 60 * 45 = 2700 seconds, or if you want to work in frames at 60 fps you can use 60 * 60 * 45 = 16200. (I usually leave the full calculation in the parameter, so it’s easy to tune later on).

So your approach could be to convert your LTC signal to total number of frames (as a frame is the most detailed unit in an LTC signal), and feed a CHOP with the current frame number as index signal into your Animation COMP. But sometimes it’s much easier to just work in seconds as the cuelist is also written in seconds, and is that enough accuracy for your project.

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I think I had the Play Mode, the Input Index Unit, and the Range all sorted.

What I am having trouble is to set the actual length of the animation, in the Edit Animation
window. I am stuck to an animation 600 frames long.
There is a blue flag to the right of my animation, that says 600.
Do I need to change the Start and End, RStart and REnd parameters in the bottom left window to change the length of my animation?

I have attached the .toe file I am working if that helps. I am using 30fps LTC.

Thanks again for all your help so far, I really appreciate it.
LTC animation test.toe (5.67 KB)

The blue flags indicate just the end of the TD timeline (which is a bit of a relic from the past, as nobody uses the big timeline at the bottom of the screen in TD anymore) . But if you zoom out in your animation editor(Hold MMB and scroll left) , you’ll see green flags at 0 and 1800 which indicate the real range of your animation.

I’m not sure what you did to your Animation COMP that you could not see the animation indicator scroll by, but I made a quick setup where I placed a new Animation COMP, with two random channels which shows the animation indicator going from 0 to 1800 in sync with your ltc frame output. Hope this helps!
LTC animation test_v2.1.toe (5.77 KB)

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Ok Nettoyeur,
this seems to be working like a charm, and I am very thankful for your help. I owe you few!

However, there’s one thing that really concerns me.
if I accidentally delete a channel in my Edit Animation window by pressing the X near to the channel name, I cannot Undo! (see picture attached).

I was familiarising with the Edit Animation window, then I accidentally clicked on the X and my channel with 50 mins of test animation was deleted and could not Undo!

this seems a bit weird, I can undo keyframes changes, but cannot undo animation channels being deleted.

Is there a workaround this? is this a bug?
X_near_Channel.png

I don’t think there’s a workaround except saving you animation COMP often. (You can rightclick your animation COMP and do a Save as Tox. You can drag a toxfile into your TD network)
You can place a request in the RFE forum to add undo functionality to deleting channels.

Is it something that could be implented in Touch designer?
An easy sort of basic keyframing system, because this method here is not that practical for making visual animation in general I personally find,specially after following this cool tutorial

youtube.com/watch?v=QCGNZ1WHMQI

there must be a more visual interactif way to tel Touch designer to record basic moves of geometry rather than moving points on a curve. Or maybe not, just a suggestion towards a more userfrendly TD.

I’m not able to delete individual keyframes in the GUI . I thought the manual said that you select key(s) and hit delete. I’m not having any results.

I can’t reproduce that (2018.27550 windows). Make sure you have selected a point (or multiple points). Here’s how a selected point looks, it’s tangent handles get visible in grey. If I press the delete button now that point gets deleted.
point-selected.png

yeah, its weird. Delete key works on all my other stations, except for this new MSI gaming computer. It’s either an issue with this particular computer, or maybe because I, using the experimental builds on the MSI? Not sure what is going on here.

I just opened blender and used the key to delete the default cube wiht no issue. IM kind of stumped, not sure if i should pursue this as a ‘bug’. i guess im going to try and install a non-experimental version and see how that works

yep, I went back from experimental builds to the version you used and the delete keyframes works. I guess I will point this out in ‘bugs’

Hello and thankyou for this thread.
Do you know if it is possible to show a trail chop as a channel of the Animation Comp? Without the possibility to interpolate it, just show it in order to do the automations accordingly to the pattern that is visible.
Thankyou in advance.

Hey Marcello,
welcome to the forum!

As far as I know I don’t think that it’s possible to “import” a trail CHOP in the Animation COMP, but there are some solid ways to achieve what you are describing.

Have you tried the Lookup CHOP?

simple example attached:
lookup.toe (4.9 KB)

You’ll find more example in Operator Snippets

I hope this helps!

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Thankyou Fausto for your answer!
I think I found a work-around to import a Trail Chop as an animation in the Animation comp. I think I’m on the right way but there are still some problems with the final look of the automation that in the end is not in sync as it should. There must be a problem in the Frames/Sample/seconds setting but I can’t seem to find it after two days working on it. Maybe do you know what’s wrong?

I tried to create this file wich basically records the audio and draws a full trail, then, the values of the trail are taken every (lenght of the audio in frames/10) passed into a CHOPto and constituting the Y values of the automation in the timeline. The X values of the points are defined as well by (lenght of the audio in frames/10) to match the resampling.

I’m attaching the file so it’s possible to take a look.
To make it work, you have to press the two buttons (reset and start), then run the script and then click inside the Animation Comp, otherwise the automation won’t load inside the animation editor.

Thankyou very much,
marcello.



AUTOMATION INTERFACE.toe (19.8 KB)