07 - Operator Basics - TouchDesigner Tutorial: Beginner Crash Course — Transcript

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1. 0:01Now let's start going a little bit deeper on
2. 0:03each of the different types of operators
3. 0:05So like we said
4. 0:06operators is the word we use for individual nodes inside of TouchDesigner
5. 0:11and there are six different families of operators
6. 0:14And you can see already just inside of our default template
7. 0:17we've got these kind of bluey purple ones
8. 0:20we've got these green ones
9. 0:22and then we've got these gray ones
10. 0:23And we'll take a look at all of them kind of right now
11. 0:26as we go through
12. 0:27So the first thing that you probably want to learn about is the TOPs
13. 0:32which are short for texture operators
14. 0:35Now TOPs
15. 0:36if we open up our OP Create dialog as always
16. 0:38they're kind of the default one that are here
17. 0:41Uh these are all the purpley kind of blue ones
18. 0:44And like I said
19. 0:45these are texture operators
20. 0:46So what they do is they work exclusively with textures
21. 0:51So whether that's images movies
22. 0:54whether you're doing 2D kind of drawings
23. 0:57like maybe you want to make a rectangle
24. 1:00you know all of these things are focused on 2D graphics
25. 1:04rasterized graphics if
26. 1:06if you come from maybe a 3D background already
27. 1:08um movies images getting
28. 1:11you know video inputs and outputs from different kinds of hardware
29. 1:14All of these fall within the family of TOPs
30. 1:18So now the next family of operators that's very important are called CHOPs
31. 1:22And what you can see is
32. 1:22if I go to my network kind of OP Create dialog here
33. 1:27when I started with my TOPs
34. 1:29I can see the six different families across the top here
35. 1:32And clicking on each one will reveal all the operators of that different family
36. 1:38So the next important one that we should take a look at are CHOPs
37. 1:40which are short for channel operators
38. 1:43Now channel operators really focus on
39. 1:47you know different kinds of signals
40. 1:50communication really numeric data
41. 1:54control data in that sense
42. 1:55So when we think about
43. 1:57you know even in this little template project
44. 1:59we have this randomly generated noise value
45. 2:02You know we can do things like make LFOs
46. 2:07You know any type of control data
47. 2:09whether that's MIDI
48. 2:11OSC coming in from other applications
49. 2:14whether we're trying to create user interfaces with buttons and triggers
50. 2:18even though the actual user interface element is coming from a different family
51. 2:22the data
52. 2:23the control signal that it generates is going to be a CHOP
53. 2:27So CHOPs are all about numeric data and what we
54. 2:31we call that kind of numeric data channels
55. 2:35Now the next important family of operators are called DATS
56. 2:38D-A-T
57. 2:40And these are short for data operators
58. 2:43And these are kind of your pink
59. 2:44more pinky purple kind of colored family of operators
60. 2:49And data operators are really important for a number of reasons
61. 2:52The first is that they handle all of
62. 2:54our kind of string level of data
63. 2:56So like we mentioned
64. 2:57CHOPs are really for our numeric data
65. 2:59signals uh control channels
66. 3:01those kind of things
67. 3:02DATS are more similar to
68. 3:04you know if we had a table
69. 3:06and we wanted to keep a bunch of information inside the table
70. 3:10you know those kind of things can be kept inside of tables
71. 3:13We can keep text
72. 3:14We can add Python scripting
73. 3:17which we're not going to cover in this training
74. 3:18but as you you know
75. 3:20become more comfortable with TouchDesigner and you want to start using Python scripting
76. 3:23you're going to use DATS a lot
77. 3:25Basically you know
78. 3:26if you start talking to web APIs
79. 3:29and you're doing things like using HTTP requests to get information from an API
80. 3:33all of that is going to be handled in DATS
81. 3:36So DATS are a really important operator family
82. 3:39The next family of operators is probably one
83. 3:42of the more unique ones to TouchDesigner
84. 3:44are SOPs which are surface operators
85. 3:48And what that means is these are all of
86. 3:50the operators that are focused on 3D geometry
87. 3:53and more specifically
88. 3:54really that procedural 3D geometry
89. 3:57And if you come from either a Houdini background or you know of Houdini
90. 4:03you know that's Houdini really laid the groundwork for what procedural 3D is
91. 4:08how it could work
92. 4:09the power of it
93. 4:10and TouchDesigner builds on that in a real-time sense
94. 4:13So for example
95. 4:13you could do something like
96. 4:15you know generate a 3D sphere
97. 4:18and then maybe connect that to something like a noise
98. 4:25And even with these two operators
99. 4:27you kind of have this real-time generated 3D
100. 4:30kind of little blob thing doing its
101. 4:32you know whatever it's doing
102. 4:34And this is this is the
103. 4:35the job of SOPs
104. 4:37and these are all the light blue operators
105. 4:39These are all operators focused on 3D geometry
106. 4:42working on 3D geometry
107. 4:43working on surfaces
108. 4:45which is just another term for kind of a 3D surface
109. 4:48And even though we're looking at this and we're seeing 3D
110. 4:51and this kind of applies to all the families
111. 4:54behind the scenes
112. 4:54this is all just data
113. 4:55This is all just point data
114. 4:57positions colors
115. 4:59You know we'll talk about later how to move data between different families
116. 5:03but you can always think about these things in their simplest form
117. 5:07as just data
118. 5:08and then our operator families kind of just visualize that data differently
119. 5:13So with that said
120. 5:15another very important family of operators are the COMPs
121. 5:18which are short for component operators
122. 5:21Now COMPs serve a bunch of different functions
123. 5:24so it's important that we cover each one
124. 5:26And and what you can see is
125. 5:27when you come to this COMP page
126. 5:29you already have them organized in three different columns
127. 5:33Whereas you know
128. 5:34in all of our other operator families
129. 5:36it's just a kind of alphabetized giant list of operators
130. 5:40But for COMPs
131. 5:40we have them even subdivided further
132. 5:43So one of the really important ones that you'll start using even
133. 5:46as a beginner are panels
134. 5:47and panels are basically UI elements
135. 5:50So you can see here we have buttons
136. 5:52So if I create a button
137. 5:54you know I can activate the viewer here
138. 5:56and I have this little button I can click on
139. 5:58I can make a slider you know
140. 6:03basically anything that the user might interact with
141. 6:05whether it's in a user interface
142. 6:07or whether you're making it for your own control interface in your own application
143. 6:11the panel components of the comps are where you want to be looking
144. 6:16Now panels also have something called Container and
145. 6:20you know Other has Base
146. 6:22but Container is going to be our focus
147. 6:24Container is an interesting one because it serves two functions
148. 6:27The first is it can hold and group different elements of our user interfaces
149. 6:32and if you're interested in that
150. 6:34afterwards you can go check out our
151. 6:35our user interface training
152. 6:36But like you can see
153. 6:37similar to how we had here
154. 6:40it can also hold other operators
155. 6:42and and these are the operators that we can go inside
156. 6:44So for example in this container
157. 6:45I can zoom in
158. 6:47and then I'm inside of a new network /project one/container one
159. 6:51You know inside of here
160. 6:52I can make a bunch of different kind of operators
161. 6:57and then these are all contained within that container one operator
162. 7:03So comps also have that dual functionality
163. 7:05In particular containers I mean
164. 7:07you can go inside of buttons
165. 7:09and you'll see that there is already some stuff in there
166. 7:12but usually you won't be going inside of buttons
167. 7:15and sliders and things like this
168. 7:16You're probably exclusively going to be using containers
169. 7:19when you want to organize the different parts of your network
170. 7:23Now another aspect of components are the 3D objects
171. 7:27and you might be wondering well
172. 7:28why are there 3D objects here
173. 7:30even though we said SOPs are where you do all your 3D work
174. 7:33Well the components really handle the rendering side of our 3D operator
175. 7:38So you know
176. 7:39they're not going to be SOPs
177. 7:41where you can plug in plug a sphere into a thing
178. 7:43and then have it do some stuff
179. 7:45This is more once you're done your whole chain of SOPs
180. 7:48you're going to need something like a camera or
181. 7:51you know a light
182. 7:52These kind of elements that make up
183. 7:54a 3D scene are contained within this
184. 7:573D objects area of the comps
185. 8:00Two other really important uses of comps are one is the window comp
186. 8:05which we'll look at later
187. 8:07That's how you kind of take your final product
188. 8:10and assign it as a big window that's going to cover your screen
189. 8:13or projector or LED wall
190. 8:16How you get from
191. 8:17your final content to that display is going to be using a window comp
192. 8:21And then finally
193. 8:22you have this other section which
194. 8:25you know like we've already been talking about window comp
195. 8:27holds the miscellaneous operators that are still pretty important
196. 8:32For example we talked about window comp
197. 8:33There's an animation comp if you need to do any keyframes
198. 8:37things like replicator
199. 8:38which are kind of a little bit more advanced
200. 8:40But Other is kind of our catch-all where it holds any other components
201. 8:45Now
202. 8:46the final group of operators are mats
203. 8:49which are material operators
204. 8:52and you can already see there's not that many of them
205. 8:55because this is really just
206. 8:56for processing and working on the materials that are
207. 9:01then going to be applied to your 3D geometries when they get rendered
208. 9:06So a lot of the time you'll just be importing textures or using different
209. 9:10you know videos or content that you're generating as a texture
210. 9:13and these different materials
211. 9:15like the constant material or a Phong material
212. 9:18you know or if you're coming from a 3D background
213. 9:20you're probably familiar with PBRs and Substance Designer
214. 9:23Like all these different kinds of materials are available inside of TouchDesigner
215. 9:28Now you've probably seen me doing
216. 9:30uh something a little bit so far which I haven't explained
217. 9:33but all of the operators have viewers
218. 9:36And you might be thinking Well
219. 9:37thanks Tips
220. 9:38Like of course
221. 9:38they have viewers
222. 9:39That's what makes TouchDesigner cool
223. 9:41is we can see all of the elements of the process happening
224. 9:44But what I mean is that you can interact
225. 9:45with all these viewers in different ways
226. 9:48So for example
227. 9:49this little plus button at the bottom
228. 9:51and if you hover your mouse over it
229. 9:53it says Viewer Active
230. 9:54What this does is you know
231. 9:56when we started at the beginning
232. 9:57if you left-click and drag on an operator
233. 10:00you're basically just dragging that whole operator around
234. 10:03But if you left-click on a viewer
235. 10:05you'll see that all of a sudden
236. 10:07left-clicking and dragging doesn't move the operator
237. 10:09because now you're interacting with the content inside
238. 10:13Now it's important to know that you're interacting with the content inside of it
239. 10:16only in the capacity of viewing
240. 10:18So you know if I'm moving this around or zooming in
241. 10:22that's not affecting the output
242. 10:24It's only affecting the viewer that I'm looking at
243. 10:27So you can see here
244. 10:28left-clicking and dragging on a 2D texture from our top family
245. 10:32functions in a sense that I can left-click
246. 10:34and drag to transform it
247. 10:35to like pan it around
248. 10:36translate it
249. 10:37I can middle-click and drag to zoom in and zoom out
250. 10:41Uh right-click and drag doesn't really do
251. 10:42anything on a texture in this case
252. 10:45But there's a lot of different things that we can do
253. 10:47and and each operator family has a unique way of interacting with it
254. 10:50So for example you know
255. 10:52I can interact with chops in a different way
256. 10:55you know doing different things like changing the values of the
257. 10:58the scale of the grid I'm looking at
258. 11:01You know if I bring a
259. 11:02a SOP maybe something like a box
260. 11:06activating its viewer gives me kind of this 3D little
261. 11:09viewer that I can tumble around and
262. 11:12and look at this operator and
263. 11:13and maybe figure out why it's working or why it's not working
264. 11:16But all the operators have viewers
265. 11:19and you can click this little plus button
266. 11:21and when you see that the kind of boundaries
267. 11:24and color of that operator disappear
268. 11:26that means that viewer is active
269. 11:27and you can kind of interact with it dynamically
270. 11:30So that should give you a good foundation of
271. 11:32of operators
272. 11:33what the different families do
273. 11:34and just kind of basically interacting with them
274. 11:37So let's keep going