Hi everyone,
Here is the first release after a very long pause: a diffuse lighting toolkit for TouchDesigner, based on spherical harmonics, together with three videos that explain what this thing is, how it works, and how to use it without developing a sudden emotional attachment to basis functions.
The short version is this: the project stores diffuse light as data in world space instead of evaluating everything only at the final shading step. That makes it useful not only for shading itself, but also for making geometry, particles, or anything else react to the light around the scene.
You do not need to start with the theory video. If you just want to grab the components and start using them right away, begin with the second video. The theory part is there for when you want to understand what the coefficients actually mean and why the whole thing works. The files also include a PDF reference document, and you can absolutely feed that into whatever AI assistant, LLM, or coding tool you prefer to make the whole thing easier to explore and adapt.
Anyway, I hope the toolkit is useful, and I’d genuinely love to see what you manage to build with spherical harmonics. If you do something interesting with it, show me — half the fun of releasing this stuff is seeing where other people take it.
Videos:
▶ SH01 — Theory — Storing Light as Data
▶ SH02 — Lighting Toolkit for TouchDesigner
▶ SH03 — Making project from scratch
