instance noodles

Hello, just want to know if anybody has any thoughts about how this might start to be accomplished in touchdesigner? Or is it worth it to learn vvvv and come up with a pipeline into touch?

vvvv.org/contribution/instance-noodles

description: youtu.be/NF3m_hSAj2g?t=251

Link to another thread that mentions it: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10727&p=41034&hilit=instance+noodles#p41034

What part of that are you looking to port?

Have you looked at this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10727&p=41034&hilit=noodles#p41034

TOPs are 2D quads, so I don’t know if there’s a good way to apply a geometry shader per TOP… at least not in a way that won’t end up being messy. I’m sure you could think through a way to do this with a GLSL mat and a limited number of samplers.

Guess I need to learn a little more about exactly what instance noodles is doing so that I can have a directed approach. Seems like the logical next step for td, vvv, etc. is to pack up gpu vertex pixel and geo shader functions into nodes or ops for use in the visual programming world.

I’ve spent some time looking into vvvv. It’s huge feature is a user-contribued library that connects to DirectX11. Having this power it’s possible to build any advanced 3D technique as vvvv nodes, a good example is InstanceNoodles.

If you look into InstanceNoodle nodes, they basically they receive a DX11Resource (a GPU-loaded geometry buffer), run it thought a vertex+geometry shader and return another instance of DX11Resource that you can pass to another node, before it finally goes to a Renderer node. Here’s an example of PipeFrame shader, it converts lines into 3D tubes: Line2Pipe.gsfx

This is correct, using textures for storing geometry would be messy and GLSL TOP doesn’t allow to use geometry shaders.

With GLSL MAT it’s possible to perform a transformation like the Pipeframe transform, but it’s limited to a single shader pass, so you won’t be able to do more complex operations like chaining multiple effects together.

I’ve asked about a geometry shader some time ago: GLSL SOP geometry shaders. It would be good to have a response from Derivative team about this. I wonder if there are any plans for bringing in more possibilities for working with GPU-loaded geometries (there is already a CPP SOP node allowing to load geometries straight to GPU in the experimental build). With some additional features like geometry shaders and compute shaders for geometries it would make us users able to port InstanceNoodles (at least partially) to TouchDesigner.