03 - Creating Operators - TouchDesigner Tutorial: Beginner Crash Course — Transcript

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1. 0:01Now that we know how to move around a little bit
2. 0:03let's talk about creating operators
3. 0:04because that's kind of the bread and butter of what we do inside TouchDesigner
4. 0:08All these operators we have
5. 0:09these little nodes
6. 0:11each one does a specific thing
7. 0:13and we're able to achieve really complicated functionality by
8. 0:17chaining together lots of little individual nodes
9. 0:20So let's say we wanted to create a node
10. 0:22There's two different ways we can do this
11. 0:24The first is to put your mouse over that grid background
12. 0:27and you double-click
13. 0:29and you get this little pop-up dialog here
14. 0:31And we call this the Op Create dialog or the Op Create menu
15. 0:35And this has lists and lists
16. 0:38which we'll talk about later
17. 0:39of all the different operators you can make
18. 0:41And essentially all you have to do is pick one
19. 0:43click on it
20. 0:45You'll see that now there's a kind of highlight around my mouse
21. 0:48because it's waiting for me to tell it
22. 0:50where I want to put that operator
23. 0:52I can then click again on the background
24. 0:54and I'll have created that operator
25. 0:57So I'm going to go ahead and delete that
26. 0:58and I'll show you the other way
27. 0:59which is kind of the more preferred way
28. 1:01which is to use the keyboard shortcut Tab
29. 1:04When you hit Tab
30. 1:05you'll immediately be presented that same Op Create dialog
31. 1:09And what you could do instead of kind of looking around
32. 1:12and clicking through is
33. 1:14you know this is
34. 1:15where we start talking about some of the tricks that more the pros do
35. 1:18is that you know
36. 1:19you don't want to double-click
37. 1:20and then spend a bunch of seconds looking in here for an operator
38. 1:23Essentially you hit Tab
39. 1:25and you start typing the name of the operator
40. 1:28and you can see as I type it
41. 1:29it gets entered into this little search box here
42. 1:32And what happens is TouchDesigner will gray out all of the other options
43. 1:37You'll see kind of the option you had here
44. 1:39And for example
45. 1:40if I do something with multiple entries
46. 1:42like if I do type in movie
47. 1:44you can see that movie file in and movie file out here are highlighted
48. 1:47whereas everything else is grayed out
49. 1:49And the nice thing is we don't even have to use our mouse to
50. 1:52then go back to that edge
51. 1:54We can just hit Enter
52. 1:56and an edge top
53. 1:58in this case will get created right under where our mouse was
54. 2:01So this makes it really easy to just go through
55. 2:04You know you you hit Tab
56. 2:06you open up the Op Create dialog
57. 2:09you start typing what you want
58. 2:10and you don't even have to finish it because as you can see
59. 2:12I typed chan-nel
60. 2:14I didn't finish channel or mix
61. 2:16but channel mix because it's the only one highlighted right now
62. 2:19If I was to hit Enter
63. 2:20it would create a channel mix top for me
64. 2:23So those are the two ways that we can go about creating operators
65. 2:26I highly recommend getting into that habit of using the
66. 2:29Tab key to open up the Op Create dialog
67. 2:31and even right from the get-go
68. 2:33trying to search for the things you want by typing for them