01 - Get Started & Downloads - TouchDesigner Tutorial: Beginner Crash Course — Transcript

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1. 0:10Hello and welcome to this introductory training to TouchDesigner
2. 0:14This is going to act
3. 0:15as a sort of crash course that will show you
4. 0:17all the basics of how to use TouchDesigner
5. 0:20how to get going
6. 0:21and it'll serve as a good starting point
7. 0:22so that you can check out any of the
8. 0:24other video trainings that I have available
9. 0:26So the first question that we have to kinda ask ourselves is why learn TouchDesigner
10. 0:31and why stick with it
11. 0:33And I think it's an important question to ask
12. 0:34because it's not exactly an easy software to learn
13. 0:37So for me the answer is
14. 0:39is pretty simple
15. 0:40The first element is that TouchDesigner is a really
16. 0:43unique piece of software that's kinda unlimited in
17. 0:46in all kinds of different directions
18. 0:48You know it can play as many movies as your hardware can support
19. 0:51It can generate as much content as your hardware support
20. 0:54Basically TouchDesigner is very hard to make it not be able to do something
21. 0:59as long as you have either
22. 1:00A the hardware or B
23. 1:02enough ability inside of TouchDesigner to do what you wanna do
24. 1:05It can take tons and tons of video outputs and inputs
25. 1:10I'm sure you've seen tons of projects
26. 1:11where it seems like there's a hundred screens
27. 1:14or projectors all being driven by some TouchDesigner system
28. 1:16and you're like how could that possibly even be possible
29. 1:20TouchDesigner is also unique because it can basically render content at almost any resolution
30. 1:26uh high frame rates
31. 1:27low frame rates
32. 1:28It's super customizable in that sense
33. 1:31Uh you can connect to all kinds of hardware
34. 1:33DMX Art-Net
35. 1:35Uh we'll talk about that in a moment
36. 1:37So you can basically connect anything to TouchDesigner
37. 1:39and that's that's not only unique but extremely powerful
38. 1:42And what brings a lot of people to TouchDesigner is interesting
39. 1:46because there's no one track to get into TouchDesigner
40. 1:50So you know
41. 1:50it's not just artists coming from a music background getting into TouchDesigner
42. 1:54It's not just visual artists
43. 1:56It's not just kinda UI people
44. 1:58It's not architects
45. 2:00It you know all different people from all different kinds of fields
46. 2:03and disciplines are bringing what they know
47. 2:05trying to use TouchDesigner in its kinda unlimited capacity to do really interesting things
48. 2:10And because of that
49. 2:11you'll see as we start learning the different parts of TouchDesigner
50. 2:14it has so many built-in features
51. 2:16some of which you'll think
52. 2:18you know who uses this
53. 2:20And that's because there's been
54. 2:21so many different kinds of disciplines that have come to TouchDesigner
55. 2:24been successful with it
56. 2:25asked for different features
57. 2:27that it has a lot more breadth
58. 2:29and capability than you might find from other
59. 2:32uh packages that might be really specific
60. 2:34Like you know Max MSP is really strong with audio
61. 2:36and it you know
62. 2:37it really crushes with the audio
63. 2:38But then
64. 2:39but once you start to veer away from audio
65. 2:41some things become a little bit more difficult
66. 2:43whereas TouchDesigner kinda can deal with
67. 2:45so many different disciplines' worth of data or programming or features
68. 2:51Another really great benefit of TouchDesigner is its support for industry standards
69. 2:55So you know like I mentioned earlier
70. 2:56we we can do DMX
71. 2:58Art-Net OSC HTTP TCP
72. 3:01UDP I mean WebSockets
73. 3:03Spout UDT MIDI
74. 3:05RTSP video streams
75. 3:06I mean that's just a small number of some of the protocols
76. 3:11and industry standards that are supported natively inside of TouchDesigner
77. 3:14So this isn't like you know
78. 3:15going to Unity and then hoping that some
79. 3:18uh thing you download off the asset store has been updated
80. 3:21and works still with the latest version of Unity
81. 3:23otherwise you know
82. 3:24did you just waste a bunch of money
83. 3:25We don't have any of that
84. 3:26You know all all of these
85. 3:27things that I'm talking about are native operators
86. 3:29inside of TouchDesigner supported by the developers
87. 3:32so you know they're gonna work and they're gonna be reliable
88. 3:35There's also really great support for a lot of cutting-edge hardware
89. 3:37I mean when Vive came out
90. 3:39we were one of the first platforms to
91. 3:40to get native support
92. 3:42Same with Oculus RealSense
93. 3:44the Vioso stuff uh
94. 3:46Kinect 2 Leap Motions
95. 3:47Basically like any of the cool hardware that
96. 3:49you probably wanna use in your installations
97. 3:52there's probably again
98. 3:52native support for it not just
99. 3:54you know hopefully some third-party developer made a thing and it
100. 3:57like still works and it
101. 3:59it got updated recently
102. 4:00None of that like we have all that support native
103. 4:03It's also extremely extensible
104. 4:05and what I mean by that is
105. 4:06let's say that there was some kind of piece of hardware
106. 4:09or software that you wanna talk to that wasn't already natively in there
107. 4:13There's so many ways that you can add functionality to TouchDesigner
108. 4:16whether it's through Python and
109. 4:18you know doing scripting and
110. 4:19and talking to different web platforms on your own
111. 4:22whether it's through making uh
112. 4:23C++ operators
113. 4:25which allows you to kind of even create your own nodes
114. 4:28for very specific purposes
115. 4:30or whether you're using something like GLSL
116. 4:32which is uh
117. 4:33the GPU shading language that
118. 4:34you know we cover in a couple of our other trainings
119. 4:38One thing that's really good
120. 4:39if you're coming to TouchDesigner now is that
121. 4:41the pre-built set of tools are growing
122. 4:43You know before there wasn't really that much
123. 4:45so you kinda had to build everything yourself
124. 4:47But now it's getting to a point where you have
125. 4:49you know a lot of tools for 3D projection mapping
126. 4:52you know similar to uh
127. 4:53MapAMock from OpenFrameworks
128. 4:55or we have things that are similar to MadMapper
129. 4:58for doing kind of your 2D projection masking
130. 5:01We got a lot of stuff for edge blending
131. 5:02grid warping you know
132. 5:04talking to different APIs
133. 5:05Like so many tools exist now that can really help you get started
134. 5:09and those are covered also in our other trainings
135. 5:12With all that said I mean
136. 5:12that sounds like a
137. 5:14a TouchDesigner commercial by all means
138. 5:16and it really is a powerful program
139. 5:19but it isn't perfect just like anything else out there
140. 5:22Uh a few things that we're gonna
141. 5:23talk about maybe in some other trainings
142. 5:26are how to get around audio
143. 5:27because audio can be a little bit tricky for new users
144. 5:30Um it's also easy for beginners to hit optimization stumbling points
145. 5:35Like I said earlier
146. 5:36TouchDesigner is kind of unlimited in all directions
147. 5:38but if you don't really have the skills to push it
148. 5:41you could easily fall short and end up thinking to yourself
149. 5:46Wow this program is
150. 5:47is not effective and it's really weak
151. 5:48How are all these other people able to get so much out of it
152. 5:51It really comes down to your skills as a developer
153. 5:54On top of that
154. 5:54the documentation can be quite frustrating
155. 5:57Um I
156. 5:58I talk a lot about documentation and where to find specific documentations
157. 6:02And it's really important
158. 6:03the last thing I'm gonna say
159. 6:04is that you have to approach TouchDesigner with a real self-learning attitude
160. 6:09You can't come to TouchDesigner
161. 6:11and think that everything's gonna come down on a silver platter
162. 6:14because a lot of the time you'll be figuring out new things
163. 6:17and new ways to do things on your own
164. 6:19And having that attitude of self-learning and
165. 6:21and problem-solving and getting through things will really put
166. 6:24you in the mindset to be successful
167. 6:26Otherwise frankly
168. 6:27you're probably just gonna be frustrated and quit
169. 6:29So with all that said
170. 6:30let's get started at looking at the basics