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08 - Parameters & Operator Info - TouchDesigner Tutorial: Beginner Crash Course — Transcript

by The Interactive & Immersive HQ · 2,737 words · 356 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00Now that we've started learning about operators
0:03it's important to kind of move into parameters
0:06Now what are parameters
0:08Parameters are what we call the values that are available
0:12and can be changed for each given operator to control its functionality
0:17Every single operator has them
0:19They can be scripted manually controlled
0:22tied to UIs
0:23They can be random numbers that are generated
0:26There's so much flexibility in
0:27what you can do with the different parameters
0:29that it gives TouchDesigner the power to basically
0:32do whatever you want it to do
0:33So the first thing you need to know is where the parameter window is
0:37Now if you open up TouchDesigner by default
0:39you'll have this area in the top right here
0:42and by default
0:43it starts the project with open
0:45But the first thing you should know is how to open and close it
0:47because sometimes it accidentally gets closed
0:50and new users don't know how to open it again
0:52But if you use the P key on the keyboard
0:55and like we said earlier
0:57this is still lowercase even
0:58though at the bottom of my screen everything's in capitals
1:01This is a lowercase P that I'm hitting
1:02Caps Lock is off
1:04and hitting that P key opens and closes that parameter window
1:08So sometimes you might be working and you aren't working with parameters
1:11and you kinda just wanna see more of your network
1:13and have more real estate
1:15You might cho choose to close that parameter window
1:18but other times you'll probably be working with it open
1:21Now
1:22if you wanted to take this parameter window
1:24and maybe disconnect it from this network editor
1:27because right now it's kinda locked to our network editor
1:30you could also go to an operator
1:32you could right click on it and click the parameters
1:36which will open a floating window version of your parameter window
1:40And you can see here
1:41if I drag this next to the docked one
1:44it's all the same parameters
1:46just if for some reason you wanted to have a floating version so that
1:49you know maybe you turn off this viewer
1:52you're looking around
1:53you're going into different areas of the network
1:55and you wanted to have those parameters kinda available
1:57to you in a little floating window
1:59that's how you would do that
2:01So what I'm gonna do is I close that window
2:03I'm gonna hit P again to open my parameters
2:05and let's start by changing a few parameters and thinking about how that works
2:11So an easy one that we can do is
2:13we'll go to this movie file in
2:15That's probably gonna be an operator you're gonna use a lot
2:18And you'll see immediately there's lots of different types of parameters
2:22There there's not just like
2:2420 different sliders with values
2:26There's you know for example
2:28this file one allows us to read a file
2:30and what we can see is the path here
2:32And what you'll find you'll be doing often is that
2:35if you have something like this
2:36and you can't see the rest of the path
2:38you can always click and drag this little edge of the parameters
2:42and you can basically make it bigger until you see all of your data
2:47But let's say we wanted to change this file
2:48What I could do is come over here
2:50and either type the path of a new file
2:53or what I could do is click on this plus button
2:57which would open up kind of a little file selector
2:59And in this case
3:00we'll see that this automatically starts by pointing to
3:03the kinda stock material that comes with TouchDesigner
3:07And probably one of my favorite go-to tools is count
3:10mov so I'll load that in
3:13which gives you a one hundred frame little counter movie
3:18And then let's say I wanted to do things like
3:20turn the playback of the video on and off
3:22Well we go over to this play command
3:24I have this little on and off button that I can click
3:27and just as simply as clicking it changes it
3:29I have a speed slider here
3:31so I can slow it down
3:35Or I can speed it back up
3:37You know we have these queue buttons here
3:38to queue it back to the beginning
3:40You know there's different pages of operators or different pages of parameters here
3:44Some of them you probably won't use
3:46but you know
3:46we'll go into more of these parameters later
3:48as we start looking at kinda some of the
3:50more useful operators that you're gonna need to know
3:51as a beginner
3:53But it's important to note that there are different kinds of opera uh
3:55different kinds of parameters
3:57Playing with them will be kind of a
3:59a good exploration for you
4:00So you can see here
4:02this play mode is actually a dropdown with three different options here
4:06Now with that said
4:08what you'll notice immediately is something like speed
4:11It goes from zero to one by default
4:13with its little user interface element here
4:16the little slider
4:17But what if we wanted to go faster
4:18I mean does TouchDesigner really limit us to
4:21zero to one speed on a video
4:23Absolutely not
4:24It's just that the default range is between zero
4:27and one on the little user interface gadget
4:30So if I wanted to go two times speed
4:32what I could do is just
4:33you know click inside of the little value field here
4:38delete the one
4:39put something like two hit Enter
4:42and all of a sudden my movie is running at two times speed
4:45I could do the same thing
4:46I can say okay well
4:46maybe make it thirty times speed
4:48Hit Enter
4:50Now it's thirty x speed out of control
4:53so let me set that back to one
4:55But you might be thinking to yourself
4:57Well that's great
4:58but it becomes a little annoying
5:00if you're trying to kind of fine-tune a value to have to
5:03you know go in here one point one
5:06click in again no
5:06I want one point two
5:08No actually I need like
5:09one point one five
5:10Like these kind of activities are really normal
5:13where because our work is generative
5:15you might not exactly know what parameter you need
5:17so you're gonna play with it
5:18You maybe wanna change the values
5:19move them up a little bit
5:20see how it looks
5:21move it down a little bit
5:22see how it looks
5:23So for these
5:23we have something called the value ladder
5:26So the value ladder is very useful
5:29because it basically eliminates the need
5:31for us to type a lot of these kind of values
5:33So to use the value ladder
5:35there's two different ways you can use it
5:36and this goes back to why it's nice to have a good mouse
5:39The easiest way to use it is to hover your mouse over a parameter
5:43So example like I'm putting it over this one point
5:46one five value here
5:47and you middle click and hold
5:50And when you middle click and hold
5:51you'll have this little gray kinda box appear on top of your parameter
5:57and this defines which increments you wanna change that value by
6:01So I'm gonna let go of my middle mouse
6:03and we're gonna look at this value
6:04It's one point one five
6:06and let's say for example
6:07we want it to move by increments of point zero one
6:11So maybe we wanted to see what one point one six looks like
6:14one point one seven et cetera
6:16et cetera
6:17So to do that
6:18I would middle click and holding on it
6:20I would come down to the increment of point zero one
6:23and then what I can do is
6:24when I'm hovering my mouse over point zero one
6:27if I drag off of the left edge or the right edge while still
6:31very important holding down the middle mouse button
6:34you'll see that now I can just move my mouse left or right
6:39and it's incrementing that value in increments of zero point zero one
6:44So let's say I was already at zero point one five
6:48so I I got that value ladder again
6:50Now it's one six
6:52Do I like what that looks like
6:53You know keep moving a little bit to the right
6:54Now it's one seven
6:56Move it a little bit to the right
6:57one eight and this whole time
6:59you have to keep your
7:00that middle mouse button down
7:02You know now it's one nine
7:03I and I could think to myself
7:04Okay I like where that value is
7:06I release the middle mouse button
7:07My mouse kind of snaps back into place
7:09and that value gets written to that parameter
7:12Now we could do this in many different ways
7:14So for example
7:15if I middle click and hold
7:17we were doing in increments of zero point zero one
7:19but you can see the smallest increment is point zero zero one
7:23But you could even move this in
7:24in bigger increments of one or ten
7:26So if I really wanted to move it in kind of faster
7:29and slower increments
7:31all of those things are available to me
7:32And you can see there's a little display right here
7:36where it shows you as you kind of change that value
7:39if it goes to the left and decreases it
7:41it does a little red spiral
7:43If you increase to the right
7:44you get a little green spiral
7:46and it becomes more
7:46and more green as you kind of keep progressing through those values
7:51So that's a very very
7:52very useful thing to learn how to use
7:54and you can use it on basically any kind of value-based one
7:58You probably wouldn't wanna use it on a toggle or anything like that
8:00I can't imagine why you would
8:02But like for example
8:02if we go to this displace top here
8:05and let's say we wanted to change the source midpoint
8:08I could grab
8:09I could put my mouse over this zero point five value
8:12and just as easily start tweaking it and moving my mouse around to
8:15to scrub through values very quickly and very easily
8:19Now if for the off chance
8:22you don't have a good mouse with
8:23a middle click that you can hold
8:25and drag easily
8:27or if you're on a laptop
8:28there was a new way added
8:30uh maybe about a year ago on
8:31on how you can do this another way
8:33and that's to hover your mouse over the value
8:36You're gonna left click and hold
8:39and if you hold for just a little bit longer than you would think
8:42all of a sudden the value ladder pops up
8:45and you can do exactly
8:46what we were talking about but using the left click and hold
8:50So a lot of the kind of more senior TouchDesigner developers
8:53because we've developed that habit of using middle click
8:56that's what we use
8:57But if you wanted to
8:58you could also left click and hold for
9:00you know a few seconds until that value ladder pops up
9:04So one final thing to know about the
9:06value ladder is a small trick that a
9:08lot of people don't know about
9:09But let's say you have
9:10for example
9:11a parameter like this one
9:12source midpoint
9:13and it has two different parts to it
9:15which are the X and the Y
9:17you know the the horizontal and vertical amount of where
9:21where the midpoint is the position
9:23I could let's say
9:24you know middle click and hold and change this one to
9:28you know zero point five five
9:29and then I go to the
9:30the next one
9:31and I do that to zero point five five
9:33But if you have these kind of parameters with multiple parts
9:36and you wanna change both values equally
9:39you can actually hover over the name of the parameter
9:42and then start your value ladder here
9:45and you'll see that it actually updates both of the parameters equally
9:48Not just one of them or the other
9:51Both of them get changed equally
9:52So this can be really helpful
9:53if you're working with things like maybe translations or transforms
9:57where you're kind of just trying to move stuff around on X
9:59and Y together
10:00or if you have maybe some RGB values
10:02that you wanna change in the grayscale
10:04um you don't have to go through and change every single one individually
10:08You could just put that value ladder on the actual name
10:14So the final thing we wanna learn about kind of parameters
10:16and operators is that there's something called the operator info kind of modal
10:22And what that is
10:23is right now let's say we have this movie file in
10:27How do we know what the resolution is
10:29what the frame rate is
10:30Kind of like how do we get information about this operator
10:33You know we have access to all these parameters
10:36but within these parameters are things we wanna control
10:39There's no kind of like information area of the parameter
10:42So there's two ways we can open up this
10:44modal that gives us a lot of information
10:46The first is the method that I use and a lot of people use
10:49And again
10:50it goes back to having a good mouse
10:52If you hover your mouse over the operator and you middle click
10:56you'll get this white kind of little pop-up
10:59and it has a lot of very useful information
11:02It's it's so useful
11:04I've n had to put this inside of your crash course
11:07because first of all
11:09you get things like the performance of it
11:11so you can see the CPU cook time and the GPU cook time
11:13so that's how much time it takes every frame for it to cook
11:16You can see resolution aspect ratio
11:19format the start and end frame
11:21the sample rate which is the
11:22uh FPS in this case for a movie
11:24You know how much GPU memory it takes
11:26I mean uh there's so much information here
11:29It's extremely useful when you're kind of just getting started
11:31and maybe there's troubleshooting that you need to do
11:33You know why is my output not the right size
11:36You know maybe you need to go look at your source and
11:37and see if the resolution is correct
11:39And what you'll be able to do is you
11:41can do this on any family of operators
11:43and you'll actually get different kinds of data that's contextually based on that operator
11:48So you saw for example
11:50when I did it on a top
11:51which is a texture operator
11:53I got all this kind of texture information
11:55So I can do it on this displace as well
11:57I get resolution aspect ratio
11:58this kind of things
12:00If I do it on a chop
12:01I'll actually get different things
12:02I'll get the number of channels
12:04how many samples are inside of that channel
12:06whether it's time slice
12:08the sample rate
12:09those kind of things
12:10You know if I have a sop
12:12maybe something like a sphere
12:15I can middle click on it
12:16and I can see information like the number of points
12:18primitives vertices meshes
12:20you know the the 3D kind of coordinates
12:23the size of it
12:24the bounding box positions
12:26the center position
12:28Each family of operators has a lot of different useful
12:31contextual information that you can get from it
12:34So what happens if you wanna get this
12:36and you don't have a middle click
12:37Maybe you're on a laptop or something working
12:40If you go to the parameters of that operator
12:42you'll see in the top left corner this little I
12:46If you c left click on that
12:48you'll essentially get the same pop-up box
12:51except sometimes annoyingly you'll get
12:54a little hover menu that comes on top of
12:56it that you can't get rid of
12:57But essentially
12:58this is the kind of worst case scenario
13:00You don't have a middle click mouse
13:02you're on a laptop or something
13:03and you just need to see some of that information quickly
13:06You can click on the operator
13:07get its parameters
13:08and then click on that I to open up the little operator info modal
13:14So with that said
13:15that should give you a good idea of how parameters work
13:17and how to get the information of an operator

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