Marc Tutors Tutorial

Particle Tutorial with Marc Tuters and Jarrett Smith

This freestyle tutorial was recorded by Jarrett Smith (Derivative) and Marc Tuters (USC student) using TouchDesigner068. Marc is a new user and is using TouchDesigner for his thesis project. The sessions start with a brief introduction to the TouchDesigner interface, followed by building, animating, and shading a particle system. The last few sessions show how to make some custom interface gadgets to interact with the particle system.

These tutorials were made in April 2008 in TouchDesigner068 and the interface looks very different now. Most of the interactions are the same, with one key difference in the way you interact with the node viewers. The double spacebar feature was removed. You now can use the 'a' key, or press the [+] Viewer Active button on the bottom right of the node. There is an example file to go with most of the sessions and these files have been updated to TouchDesigner077.

• Session1 - Intro to Interface - File:Session1.tox
• Session2 - Building a Particle System - File:Session2.tox
• Session3 - Rendering the Particles - File:Session3.tox
• Session4 - Altering Particle Size with Expressions - File:Session4.tox
• Session5 - Controlling Particle Color with Expressions - File:Session5.tox
• Session6 - Optimizing your Particle System
  Note: In the Optimizing video, it's stated that you need to divide the GPU Mem Used value in the Perform CHOP by 10, this is incorrect. The value reported was in megabytes. That synth was using 1.5 gigs of GPU memory, as reported. The system had 612 megs of GPU memory on the card (GPUs can go over their GPU memory limit often if your system memory allows for it).
• Session7 - Making it into an iTunes-visualizer-thing... Feedback - File:Session7.tox
• Session8 - Changing the Look in Realtime - File:Session8.tox
• Session9 - Adding a Depth Look to Point Sprites - File:Session9.tox
• Session10 - Depth Sorting - File:Session10.tox
• Session11 - Advanced Lighting and Shading - File:Session11.tox
• Session12 - Advanced Particle Motion - File:Session12.tox
• Session13 - Building a User Interface - Intro - File:Session13.tox
• Session14 - Building a UI - Continued - File:Session14.tox
• Session15 - Connecting the UI and Finishing Touches - File:Session15.tox