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1/POPs
We start with the headliner of this release, Point Operators, which we call 'POPs'. POPs are a new family of operators that create and modify 3D data and run on your system’s GPU for better performance. Points are the building blocks of polygons, lines, curves, point clouds, and particle systems, basically any 3D geometrical shape or any form of data points. With the power of the GPU behind all the processing in POPs it is now possible to have amazing real-time performance for complex geometry with animation, particles and point clouds with millions of points, or manipulation of massive amounts of data however you see fit.
The POP family’s primary goal is to modernize TouchDesigner’s 3D geometry engine from the older SOP family which had limitations in real-time due to their CPU-based nature (SOPs were conceived back in 1995!). POPs are designed from the ground up with a GPU’s architecture in mind to leverage the most performance from your system.
Furthermore, a second parallel goal of POPs was to create a general purpose system to work with data directly on a GPU more easily with nodes, giving you a way to access that power without having to write shaders or custom code. You can use POP’s points with attributes to manipulate all kinds of information, from lighting control and laser systems, to data point mapping, to machine learning tensors, and much more. We can’t wait to see how you use POPs in your workflows and what you create with them.
POPs - Main Concepts
Every POP contains a set of points with attributes. The most common attribute is Position (P), the position in 3D space of the points. The POP may have other attributes like Color (Color - with a red, green, blue and alpha component) and Normal (N - a direction vector with 3 components). All points can also have user-defined attributes or can get attributes automatically-generated from certain POP operators, these custom attributes can attach any data you need to the points you are working with.
The concept of GPU-resident computing is key for real-time performance, where you can keep your computing on the GPU to avoid suffering from slow-downs caused by sending/receiving from the CPU. POPs are all calculated on the GPU except when a CPU operation is absolutely needed, like loading files or saving to disk. Since TOPs are also GPU-based, interactions between them stay on the GPU and are optimized for making new workflows between the two families.
POPs - Getting Started
We have a number of resources ready to help you learn about POPs. From inside TouchDesigner, you can always click the “?” help icon in a POP’s parameter dialog to read the POP's summary and parameter help. Furthermore, we have a preliminary set of POP Operator Snippets you can access from the Help menu, or right-clicking on a POP, or right-clicking directly on a POP in the OP Create Dialog.
DOWNLOAD POP EXAMPLES
If you’d like to learn hands-on through examples, download the POPsExamples folder. There you’ll find POPGuide built by Darien Brito which gives a quick and fun example of many POPs (tip: press the "Show Network" button to see how the POP is used in context in the network editor).
Another useful resource in POPsExamples is Overview.toe, walking you through many key features and concepts found throughout POPs. Most of these overview examples have been added to OP Snippets as well. This download package contains various examples we’ve gathered over the last year of POPs development.
Finally, for a complete reference of all POPs concepts, see our “Learning About POPs” article to go on a deep dive through the POPs architecture and concepts.
POPs - 3D Viewer Options
As points in POPs are capable of having many custom attributes, we needed new ways of visualizing this data in viewers. Geometry viewers and POP node viewers have a host of new features found in their right-click menu options.
Point attributes can be displayed in a number of new ways, as numerical values in text overlays, vector arrows useful for directional data, dots with a normalized color gradient, or directly as color.
There are also new overlay options such as built-in bounding boxes, scale markers on axes, bounding projections on both axes and planes, and an improved grid look to check out. All this is more accessible via the new menus and a set of new keyboard shortcuts.
We’ll continue to add functionality to 3D viewers in the coming months to give you a variety of new ways to inspect and visualize your data.
2/New DMX Workflows
We've simplified DMX workflows by bringing them to POPs where each point can represent your light, LED, laser etc. and hold all the attributes you need. First we introduce the DMX Fixture POP which lets you setup all the channels in your lighting fixture's profile. Each point and primitive fed to the DMX Fixture POP will represent a copy of this fixture, inherently giving you a position in 3D space for every fixture in your setup. From here, the DMX Fixture POP will construct all the channels and universes required to address your fixtures. Second, the new DMX Out POP takes one or more DMX Fixture POPs, merges all the universes and sends the data out to your DMX, Art-Net, sACN, KiNET, or FTDI devices. A third new operator, the DMX Map DAT, is useful for visualizing DMX universe and channel layouts and can be helpful for troubleshooting channel conflicts between DMX fixtures. You'll find a DMX Map DAT docked to every DMX Out ready to help debug any such conflicts.
Last but not least, a new Pan Tilt CHOP has been introduced to make it easier to control your lighting fixture's pan and tilt controls, something that previously wasn't trivial using raw rotational values in CHOPs.
3/Laser UpDATES
For this release the Laser CHOP was redesigned with the help of LaserAnimation Sollinger who guided us in speccing and implementing the necessary parameters to improve behavior and performance. The laser point generation process was overhauled, with improvements to blanking calculations, image sharpness/uniformity, point repeating, and general stability. We’re excited and grateful for our partnership with LaserAnimation Sollinger to bring you these new Laser CHOP updates and we'll continue to collaborate on improvements in the future.
Of course, with the introduction of POPs, the Laser CHOP can now take input directly from POP geometry as well.
The Laser Device CHOP continues its role interfacing with various laser devices. For Helios devices specifically, we’ve also updated the SDK and added support for 16-bit color and position and new custom user channels.
4/Color Space Workflows
This year TouchDesigner gains a host of Color Space features to enable color-correct SDR and HDR workflows. The new color-correct workflows require you to opt-in on a per-project basis so existing files will not change unexpectedly. A Color Space defines what 'true' color an RGB value specifies. For example, what light wavelength should a red of (1, 0, 0) create out of your display device? Different color spaces will produce a different shade of red when (1, 0, 0) is converted into light. Color Space must be managed in a project to ensure an image produces the same colors when shown on one display device vs. another display device, and also when capturing from a camera to ensure that the image can be displayed with the correct colors.
You can now set the working color space of TouchDesigner to one of sRGB Linear, ACEScg, DCI-P3 Linear, Rec. 2020 Linear, or ACES 2065-1. Window settings are available to select between 8-bit or 10-bit SDR and 10-bit or 16-bit HDR pixel format operations, with HDR previews now available throughout TouchDesigner in the network editor, floating windows, node viewers, panels and everywhere you can view your content. All these settings can be found in the Preference Dialog’s new Color tab, and we recommend reading articles Color Space and Color Space Workflows for details and usage.
5/Video & Streaming
High performance playback and streaming of video is a critical part of many TouchDesigner projects. We continue to add to features here to improve TouchDesigner’s best-in-class media serving toolset.
ST2110 is a set of industry standards for transporting media over an IP network, delivering uncompressed video and audio streams, timing data, and ancillary data streams using existing network infrastructure technology. Support for ST2110 arrives in TouchDesigner with the new ST2110 In TOP and ST2110 Out TOP. We have also added an ST2110 Device CHOP which is used to configure the ST2110 network interface. The new ST2110 TOPs will reference this CHOP to determine the available channels to send and receive data on. These new nodes work with BlackMagic’s IP range of cards and Deltacast DELTA-ip_ST2110 devices.
You’ll also find a number of improvements to the Video Device In and Out TOPs where we’ve spent a lot of effort extending device support. Starting with Blackmagic devices, we’ve added support for Timecode over HDMI and synchronized outputs on multi-output cards. For Deltacast devices, 8K in and out performance has been optimized, and it’s now possible to capture up to 16 audio channels per device. Bluefish444 devices can now support 10-bit input and output and AJA devices can now use the 'Sync to Input Frame' with multiple inputs. We’ve also improved device selection menus to make projects more portable between machines.
The Video Stream Out TOP has received new streaming options with AV1 and H265/HEVC video codecs as well as AAC and Opus audio codecs, in addition to improvements for buffering and streaming performance.
6/Python Tools
When working with python in TouchDesigner there's a lot to look forward to in this release.
Let start with TDI Library which is a tool for Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) which enables popup help and code-completion when working with Python. It contains the help documentation and Python descriptions of all built-in TouchDesigner objects, classes and functions.
The next tool is Thread Manager, a built-in system component and a set of palette components designed to facilitate Python threading in TouchDesigner. One difficulty with python in TouchDesigner is that TouchDesigner's main thread needs to continuously run (it is the main thread that runs the editor, generates output images, audio and network data, etc) yet Python operations can block the main thread and this blocking will result in frame drops or freezing until the operation finishes.
The Thread Manager simplifies Python threading and task handling in TouchDesigner allowing you to manage queues of python threads without stalling TouchDesigner’s main thread. Read our Introduction to the Thread Manager for a walkthrough.
The next new tool you can find in the Palette is our new Python Environment Manager tdPyEnvManager. This component can sideload and manage python virtual environments, conda environments, and third-party packages and libraries. Users can create, activate and interact with Python vEnvs and conda environments from this component's parameter dialog and can interact directly with pip in both vEnvs and conda CLIs, as well as conda commands when using conda. With this tool, you can turn the python tools you develop and deploy into 1-click installations to address the conflicts and dependancy issues of the past. Read our Introduction to the Python Environment Manager here.
If you use the Logger tool in TouchDesigner, it has received major improvements you can review here.
TouchDesigner’s core python version has been updated to 3.11.10.
7/New OPerators
We set out to make things a bit more convenient while working in TouchDesigner with a few new operators.
The Render Simple TOP is a light weight TOP letting you quickly render a scene without having to specify a camera, lights etc. It’s there for a quick render of a POP network when that’s all you need.
A new Layer Mix TOP lets you composite unlimited image layers in a layer stack, and gives you individual adjustment controls over each layer. To avoid clutter and unneeded parameters, you can select only the adjustments you want to use by enabling them. You can also specify a background plate to composite your layers over.
The Serial Devices DAT is a utility DAT that simply lists the available serial ports and identifies if a port is in use or not.
While not new, the ZED OPs have received a major overhaul for ZED cameras such that they should be revisited. Updating to SDK 5.0.4 enabled access to a number of new features. The ZED TOP is now the starting point for working with ZED cameras, with ZED CHOP, ZED POP, and ZED SOPs all now pointing to a ZED TOP which selects and sets up the ZED camera. A new ZED Select TOP was added to select different image streams from the ZED camera in parallel. The ZED TOP also now has an image type called “Mask” that provides a single mask from the detection of bodies with the tracking ID as the pixel value. Additionally, the ZED TOP now supports SVO2 file playback or streaming over the network from another machine using ZED native streaming. The ZED CHOP now supports for 38-point body tracking and 2D, 3D and head 3D bounding boxes. A new ZED POP creates point-cloud capture data by scanning your surroundings with the camera.
8/Data In - DATA Out
Getting information rich data in-to and out-of TouchDesigner is one of the cornerstones of TouchDesigner’s interoperability. Improved options for reading and writing files will help with sharing your assets between projects, applications and teams more smoothly.
Starting with metadata, both the Movie File Out TOP and Audio File Out CHOP now support metadata writing to various file formats summarized here. The Media File Info DAT can now read EXIF metadata and gains a .fetchInfo() python method. These 3 operators share a new .metadata member giving you quick access to the metadata via python.
Finally, for the first time TouchDesigner has a way to easily export geometry file sequences. The new POP family comes with a File Out POP letting you save files or file sequences of geometry/points in a number of formats. Currently supporting .obj, .exr, .ply, .spz, and .e57, this is just the beginning with more formats on the way. POPs also support importing of FBX, USD, Alembic, and all the point cloud formats and geometry formats previous supported in TOPs and SOPs, so POPs are ready to fit right into any geometry workflows you might already have.
The Movie File Out TOP has gained VVC H.266 encoding for video, and AAC encoding for audio. There are also new options here for 'Stereo Mode' and 'Spherical Mode' which will write out the correct metadata so this content is loaded correctly as Stereo or Spherical content in other apps.
9/Miscellaneous
A number of nice new additions don’t fall into any sections above, we’d like to highlight them here.
For those using the Engine COMP, take note you can now open a floating window from a Window COMP inside the Engine COMP’s loaded .tox file. This feature is enabled using the ‘Allow UI’ parameter on the ‘Advanced’ parameter page.
The Audio Render CHOP gets a huge upgrade with a new 'Simulation' mode that supports multiple sources, scene meshes, reflections, absorption, occlusion, attenuation and more.
Previously TouchDesigner has supported 3D Textures in a few TOPs like the 3D texture TOP, Time Machine TOP, Render TOP, etc. Now we’ve gone through all TOPs and added general 3D texture support to many of them. See Release Notes for full list of supporting TOPs.
Pattern Matching is a powerful feature to specify multiple values in parameters in cases where you need to specify multiple operators, multiple channels, multiple points, etc. For example, the Render TOP allows for multiple lights, geometries and cameras, you might use ‘light*’ in the Light parameter to match all lights whose name starts with ‘light’. We have improved Pattern Matching to make it more consistent throughout TouchDesigner and easier to use with less limitations than before. Refer to the Pattern Matching documentation for details on usage.
TouchDesigner 2025 now supports NVIDIA’s new 50-series GPUs (Blackwell architecture) in all our NVIDIA-based operators. We updated the NVIDIA Maxine SDK to the latest which enables 50-series cards to work with such nodes at the NVIDIA Background, Denoise, and Upscaler TOPs and Face Track and Body Track CHOPs. Furthermore, the ZED overhaul and SDK update also ensures 50-series card support for all ZED operators.
10/Final Notes
Some important notes for this year’s release. System Requirements have been bumped up this year with TouchDesigner requiring more recent GPUs and more graphics memory for POPs. A minimum of 4GB graphics memory is required, however we recommend at least 8GB if using POPs. If you are working with a Mac, you must now be running macOS 13 Ventura or higher.
There are some Backward Compatibility changes and Known Issues which should be reviewed, especially important when upgrading your older projects to run on TouchDesigner 2025.
The new features mentioned here are just a fraction of the improvements made to this release. For a list of all changes read through the full Official Release Notes.
We'd like to thank everyone who helped with POPs development in Experimental, your suggestions, feedback and reports have been invaluable. Now with the launch of TouchDesigner 2025 and a completely new POPs family, it feels like a new chapter for TouchDesigner is beginning. Please share your creations with POPs through our COMMUNITY pages or social media (tag #tdpops), we truly can't wait to see what you'll build with them. We’re also curious what features you want to try first and what will help you immediately in TouchDesigner, join the discussion in the comments below and let us know what you’re most excited about!