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14 - Working with DATs - TouchDesigner Tutorial: Beginner Crash Course — Transcript

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0:01The next thing we're gonna build is gonna use a lot of DATs
0:03And like we said before
0:04DATs are the data operators
0:07so we can create tables text
0:09This is how you would probably work with
0:10a lot of web APIs in Python
0:13Now for this example
0:14what we're gonna do is make a little slider-controlled preset system
0:18so that we can drive a text TOP's text
0:22as well as the kinda text styles of it dynamically
0:26So with that said
0:27let's get started here
0:29I'm gonna delete everything
0:30and the first thing I'm gonna do is make my text TOP
0:34So I'll open the Op Create dialog
0:37type in text
0:38grab my text TOP
0:40and then I'm going to want to dynamically drive
0:43the text that's inside this text TOP
0:47So the way I can do that is first I'll make a text DAT
0:52and a text DAT is really
0:54you can think of it almost like a little WordPad
0:56or a little Microsoft Word without any of the features in it
0:59But essentially
1:00what you can do is activate the viewer
1:02and you can start typing inside of this text DAT
1:07and it's basically just gonna save that text in there
1:09You can manipulate it later with more DATs
1:11You can reference it for different things
1:13and that's what we're gonna do here
1:14We're gonna use a text DAT
1:15as our kind of text storage for our text TOP
1:19So like always
1:20like I said before
1:22before we start referencing any kind of data between operators
1:25it's always important to put a null
1:27So I'm gonna put a null DAT here
1:32And then I'm gonna go to my text TOP
1:34I'm gonna delete the text derivative here
1:39And then there's a parameter called DAT
1:42and essentially what this does is you can reference a DAT in here
1:45whether it's a table or a text DAT
1:47and then you can select text out of it
1:50to basically render in there instead of having to
1:52manually type the text inside this parameter
1:55So in this case
1:56what I can do
1:56for this DAT parameter is just drag
1:58and drop my null right onto that parameter
2:03and you'll see that we can see Can Start Type
2:06but it looks clipped on both sides
2:08So another really useful feature of the text TOP is on the first page
2:12we have Word Wrap
2:13which will automatically kind of figure out
2:15when those breakpoints are
2:17and wrap the text so that you're not kind of getting text clip
2:21It's very useful because it's dynamic
2:23So for instance
2:24if I go back to my text
2:25activate the viewer type something else
2:29and and and
2:31and I click outside of my text
2:33you'll see that it tries to word wrap as best it can
2:36Now what's happening is it's wrapping the words
2:40you know on the uh
2:41left and right plane so it's not getting clipped
2:43but the text is still so large that it
2:45it kind of overflows on the top and bottom
2:48So for this
2:49another really handy feature of the text TOP is
2:51is under the Font parameters to go to Auto Size Font
2:56and there's a couple options
2:57You can say Auto Fit If Too Large
2:59Auto Fit Always whatever you like
3:00For this one we'll go with Auto Fit Always
3:03That way the text will also dynamically resize
3:05so not only is it getting word wrapped on the left and right edges
3:08but it's getting resized in case it becomes too big
3:12Now with Auto Fit Always
3:13the nice thing is if we only have a little bit of text
3:15so let me delete most of this
3:22It'll also scale it upwards to kind of fill that space appropriately
3:26So those are a couple nice things about the text TOP
3:28and what we're gonna do is right now
3:30if we middle-click on our text TOP
3:32we'll see it's two fifty-six by two fifty-six
3:35Personally that's a little bit small for me
3:36so I'm gonna go to the Common page
3:38and I'm gonna update the resolution to be maybe
3:40um seven twenty by seven twenty
3:46And I'm doing that
3:47because essentially what we're gonna do is we're
3:48gonna composite this text onto another video
3:51My video is is seven twenty
3:54so I want a nice square with my
3:57text in the middle of that video
4:01So with that said
4:02what we can do now is make another text
4:05'cause let's say we have a few different preset
4:07texts pieces that we wanna change between
4:10So I'll copy and paste my text a few times
4:18And I'll add different text inside of each one
4:36Now what we're gonna do is we need a
4:38way to switch between these different text DATs
4:41and have them go into this null
4:43which then gets referenced by our text TOP here
4:47So luckily we have a really useful DAT
4:49uh we can use called switch DAT
4:51So I'll open up the Op Create dialog
4:54Switch and what we'll do is we'll have to
4:57plug all of these text DATs into the switch
4:59and then we can use this nice little index to basically switch between them
5:03Now one useful trick is you know
5:05normally what you'd have to do is you'd
5:06you'd go plug them all in one by one
5:09and you'll notice that this switch DAT
5:10similar to the composite TOP that we had earlier
5:13has a multi input
5:15so you can just keep hooking things up to it one by one
5:18But there's a nice trick that you can do
5:19where if you right click
5:20and drag and select all the operators that you wanna connect
5:24all you have to do is connect the first one
5:26and all of them will get automatically connected
5:30So now that we have them all connected
5:32we can just look inside of this switch DAT's kind of viewer
5:36And as I change that index
5:37so you can see one gives me the second one
5:40'cause remember everything in TouchDesigner starts at an index of zero
5:44I can go to two
5:45which will give me the third input
5:48and then I can go to three
5:50which will finally give me that fourth input
5:53So now if I plug this into my null here
5:55we'll see that as I change the index
5:58the text getting rendered in my text DAT is updating
6:01Now if we go beyond our index number three-You know
6:05three seven 10
6:06doesn't really matter
6:07It doesn't change because there
6:09there are no more inputs connected to that switch DAT
6:13So I'm gonna grab all of these
6:14and just move them over a bit
6:15because now that we've got our text set up
6:16we can work on some of the formatting
6:19So the things we're gonna be changing about this
6:21text are under the color page parameters
6:24And what we'll do is we'll switch up the text color
6:27as well as the alpha
6:28so that we have a couple of different looks when it's getting composited
6:32So very similarly to how we set up our
6:34text DATs here going into a switch DAT
6:36going into a null
6:38we're gonna set up a similar system but with tables
6:41And this can be thought of as like a really simple preset system
6:44You know it's it's not the most efficient one
6:46but if you're a beginner
6:47and you're just trying to save a few different states for
6:50you know something like a text DAT or maybe movie files
6:53this is not a bad system to use
6:55So the way to get started is first we're gonna make a table DAT
7:00And a table DAT functions similarly to a text DAT except
7:04you can add more rows and columns
7:05and each cell is essentially the equivalent of a text DAT
7:10but inside of a cell
7:12So let's say we wanted to have we see here font color
7:15we have RGB channels and an alpha
7:17So I wanna basically save four values in here
7:20So first thing I'm gonna do is activate the viewer
7:22so I can interact with the data inside
7:25What I can do is either right click on
7:27the empty space of this table DAT
7:29or I can go and click on the kind of
7:32uh row number here
7:33which is zero
7:34I can right click on it
7:36and you'll see I have a bunch of options
7:37I can hit add below
7:39which will add a new row
7:39Now you see I have two rows and one column
7:42Like I said I need four values
7:44so I'm just gonna keep adding rows here
7:46So now that I have four rows
7:49I also want to add another column
7:50so that way I can actually keep this clean
7:52I I wanna have
7:53You know I don't want just a
7:54table with random numbers in it that
7:56you know I'm not gonna be able to identify later
7:58I wanna have a
7:59a nice little header column and then having a
8:02a column with just my values
8:04So similarly to how we right clicked on the
8:07row numbers itself to add a row below
8:09what I can do is go to the columns
8:11right click on this column zero
8:13and then hit add after
8:15which will then add me another column
8:19So now what I can do is I
8:20can just click inside of a cell
8:22and you'll see that I have a cursor blinking here
8:23and I can start typing
8:24So I'll say color red
8:27I'll drop down to the next row and say color green
8:34Next color blue
8:35And you can even navigate this table with your keyboard arrows
8:38so then I can come down here and type opacity
8:43And then let's say my first preset is actually just gonna be white text
8:47which is gonna be one one
8:48one for the RGB and full opacity
8:53Now what I can do is I'll turn off the viewer just
8:55so that I can actually control the operator in my network again
8:59I'll copy and paste it four times for our four presets
9:03This way each one of our text objects
9:06here will have a preset of its own
9:10And then I'll go through and just edit that style a little bit
9:12So maybe our second preset is going to be red text
9:17so I'm gonna zero the G and the B
9:20Maybe I'll leave the opacity full here
9:23For my third preset
9:25maybe I'll do something like zero point five for green
9:33zero point seven for blue
9:36and we'll keep the opacity full
9:38And then finally
9:39for my last one
9:40what I'll do is maybe something more subtle
9:41so maybe zero point three on the R
9:44zero point three on the G
9:46zero point three on the blue
9:47so that way it essentially becomes a bit of a dark gray
9:51And then I'll actually set the opacity also down to zero point three
9:53so that it kind of fades into the background
9:57Now with all my values edited
9:59I can kind of just turn off the viewer active state on these tables
10:03And then similarly to like we did with our text going into a switch
10:08we'll do the same thing with our tables
10:09We'll set up a switch DAT
10:13I'll right click and drag around all my tables
10:16connect the first one
10:18and automatic automatically they all get connected
10:22So now the same principle that we used with
10:24the switch DAT applies to tables as well
10:26which is really helpful because we can see with an index of zero
10:29we essentially get the contents of the first table
10:32If I set an index of one
10:34it switches to the contents of the second table
10:37Two gives me the third table
10:39and so on and so forth
10:43So now we have a really easy way of kind of just managing
10:46you know switching between all these things
10:48What I'm gonna do is I wanna kind of
10:50line up the presets with the text
10:53So I'm actually gonna make a little controller that'll control these indexes
10:57these indices
10:58And what I'm gonna do is use some of the
10:59things that we used in our comp section
11:01So the first thing I'll do is
11:02is just make a little slider
11:08And then I'm gonna want this slider value
11:10Well let's like
11:11let's take a look at the slider value first
11:12You know let's let's assume we don't know what's going on
11:14so I'll make a null chop
11:20And we can see the value of the slider's from zero to one
11:23but like we saw with our switch
11:25we actually want it to be from zero to three
11:29So we know how to rearrange values at this point
11:30We can insert a nice little math chop here
11:38And I'll go to the range page
11:40I know the from range is correct
11:41because my slider does in fact go from zero to one
11:45and I want the range to be from zero to three
11:51Now the only other thing I would wanna do with this
11:53just for my own sanity
11:54is what you'll see is that
11:56my value coming from the slider is actually a float
12:00So a float is basically just a
12:02a number with decimals in it
12:04You know this is different than an integer
12:05which is just a whole number
12:07Uh floats you know
12:08like one point eight four eight
12:10That's not gonna be useful
12:11for our switch because the Switch DATS don't actually interpolate
12:14You can see it just kind of hard cuts
12:16between the different indices that are plugged in
12:19So what we can do is
12:20is maybe we should round our number here
12:22as well so that it's not sending decimals
12:24so it's sending a whole number
12:26an integer
12:27that will accurately map to each one of these indices
12:30So also surprise surprise
12:33our best friend Math CHOP can also round for us
12:35So we can insert another Math CHOP
12:37after our Math CHOP that does the scaling
12:41and then on the first page
12:43we have a nice little parameter called Integer
12:46We can click on it
12:46and you can see we have a f a few different options here
12:48We can do a ceiling type of rounding
12:50a floor
12:51or just a general rounding
12:52For this case
12:53a general rounding is fine
12:56Now you can see as my kind of more gradient float value changes
13:02coming out of the output
13:04I actually have a rounded integer
13:07So now like we did with everything else before we've done
13:10if we want to control the parameter of this Switch DATS Index
13:15I just select the Switch DAT so I see its parameters
13:18I activate the viewer on my CHOP
13:21drag and drop that channel right onto the value
13:24and I choose Relative Chop Reference
13:27Now I'm gonna do the same thing
13:28for the switch that I have down here
13:30So first I'll select it
13:32and then I can just drag
13:33and drop that value again onto the index and choose my second option
13:40So now you can see as I'm moving through this slider
13:43my text is changing
13:44We haven't hooked up our style yet for the color and opacity
13:47so that'll we'll see that happen soon
13:49But we're gonna add one little trick step in between our switch here
13:53and our text
13:55Now when we switch kinda rapidly the actual content of the text
14:01that's'cause there's no real easy way
14:03for TouchDesigner to kind of blend text together
14:06The best we can do at this point is just s hard switch them
14:09But we can blend values really easily
14:12Now we can't do that in DATS
14:14because DATS are really focused on string type of data
14:17Python that kind of stuff
14:18But what we can do is actually convert this
14:21data from the DAT family back into channels
14:26and then we can use some of the techniques
14:27we used with our CHOP networks where
14:30you know we were using lag CHOPs
14:31filter CHOPs
14:33things that smooth the transition between two values
14:36So that's actually relatively easy to do in Touch
14:39So what we're gonna do first
14:41as always before I
14:42I make any big jumps
14:43I'm gonna set a little checkpoint for myself here with a Null DAT
14:48That way in case I ever need to insert anything between my switch
14:52and the area which I'm converting the values to CHOPs
14:55I'll have a nice place I can do
14:57that without having to change any other code
15:01So with that said
15:02now I'm ready to
15:02to do my little data conversion
15:04and what I can do is I can go to the CHOPs
15:07and I can use one called a DAT to CHOP
15:10And you know
15:11you're probably starting to see a trend because in
15:13in the last video we used another kind of conversion CHOP
15:15but many of the families have specific CHOPs
15:20or TOPs or operators that take the data from one family
15:24and convert them to the data type of another family
15:26So for example
15:27this DAT to CHOP that we're gonna use takes DAT data
15:30and converts it to CHOP data
15:32There's other ones
15:34For example
15:34there is a SOP to CHOP
15:36So you know in the next
15:37section we're gonna be working with SOPs
15:39but this would convert the data from a three-D model to
15:42to just numeric data
15:44You know there's all kinds of different ones here
15:46We can do uh
15:48CHOP to DAT
15:49so we can actually go in reverse
15:50if we had some maybe CHOP data that
15:51we wanted to turn into a table
15:53we could use this
15:54There's other ones here like CHOP to TOP
15:57So maybe if you had a bunch of numbers
15:59and you wanted to turn them into a
16:02a texture
16:02that's similar to what we did in our
16:04our TOP example when we were doing that cool
16:06like glitchy effect
16:08So those are a lot of different things that you can explore later on
16:11but just they're helpful to know that they exist
16:14So in this case
16:14because we have a DAT
16:15and we wanna convert into some channel data that we can
16:19then process with things like filters
16:22what I'm gonna do is make that DAT to CHOP
16:27In the DAT parameter here
16:28it wants to know the name of the DAT that I basically wanna convert
16:32so what I can do is simply drag
16:34and drop my null here right onto the parameter
16:38And by now I'm hoping that you're seeing the pattern here
16:40where a lot of things are drag and drop
16:44so don't be afraid
16:45if you don't know what's happening to just try dragging
16:47and dropping some things around
16:48and s and see if connections and references and things like that are made
16:52So in this case
16:53when we dragged Null 3 onto this DAT parameter
16:57we can see that little dotted line with an arrow got created
17:00and like I was saying before
17:02that's telling us that there's a
17:03a reference happening
17:04But unlike previously it's not animated
17:07and that's because this information isn't changing
17:09So it's not dynamic
17:10It referenced that data once
17:12and it's static now
17:14Now that we have this table
17:17you'll see that there's a bunch of parameters
17:19most of them you probably won't need to use at this point
17:22and the way we've set up our table corresponds to
17:27basically exactly how the default settings of the DAT 2 are set up
17:31So you can see now we have our first channel here
17:34which is color_red
17:36It doesn't like spaces
17:37so it replaces them helpfully for us with underscores
17:40We can see zero point three
17:42Color green is zero point three
17:43Color blue zero point three
17:45and opacity is zero point three
17:47Now if we go up to our slider and we change the values
17:52you can see we have this dynamically changing CHOP value operator now
17:57And you see color red is zero
17:59color green is zero point five
18:00blue is zero point seven
18:01opacity is one
18:03So that's great
18:03So super quick and easy
18:05We made a way to store a bunch of data
18:08A way to switch between that data
18:10and now that we've converted it back into CHOPs because it's all numeric data
18:14what we can do is use some of those things like filters
18:17So let's add a filter CHOP here
18:23And then what I'm gonna do is set the
18:24filter width to be maybe three seconds
18:27and what this is gonna do is it's gonna
18:28interpolate over three seconds between the changing values
18:32So now if I go from
18:35you know this slider
18:36where right now it's got index two to index zero
18:39you can see we get these nice smooth transitions between those two presets
18:47So that's awesome
18:47I mean that's that's basically
18:50you know in in less than
18:51a few minutes we rolled our own kind
18:52of simple preset system that you can use
18:54with kind of numeric data for parameters
18:57So the last thing we really have to do here is just as always
19:00put a null CHOP because we're about to start referencing some data
19:05I'm going into my text TOP here
19:08so I can grab the parameters under the color page
19:11and once I have them visible
19:13just like always
19:14I can activate the viewer on my null CHOP
19:16and start dragging and dropping parameters to reference them
19:22So I got my red
19:24reference my green reference my blue
19:28and then finally reference my alpha/opacity
19:36So now I'm actually gonna set the little display flag on
19:38so I can see my text in the background
19:45And now I can watch it do its kind of little state changes
19:48text changes color changes
19:50opacity changes
19:55And then the final thing we can do here is
19:56is what I did was I made a movie file in TOP
19:59so I could have a nice dynamic background
20:04I used that file plus button to open up my file chooser
20:08I went into the nature folder
20:09where we have a few kind of seven twenty P stock nature shots
20:15Then I made an over TOP just like we
20:17did in our kind of first examples
20:20And then I'm gonna put the background as my movie
20:24put my text into the first input on top of it
20:28Just like we did before prefit
20:30I don't want it to be scaled
20:31so I'm gonna change fill to native resolution
20:35And actually what I'll do is turn off the display flag on my text
20:39put a null TOP at the end of this chain
20:42and actually put the display flag on that on
20:45So now we can see
20:49you know as my values are changing and the presets are changing
20:53we can see them live on that background
20:57Now you can edit this to make this however you want
20:59Maybe you don't want to change the text here
21:00so you know
21:01we can maybe bypass our Switch DAT
21:05only have one text
21:06that way we're just changing styles
21:11You can change things like the amount of time it takes for that transition
21:15Right now it's three whole seconds
21:17which maybe is too long for you
21:19Maybe you can set it to
21:20you know zero point five seconds
21:23so now when I change it
21:25it'll be much faster
21:29And the sky's the limit here
21:30I mean we're just using with a single simple text
21:32You can have multiple texts
21:33You can have more advanced compositing
21:35whatever you like
21:36And we only did it with some styles
21:37but you could do it with
21:38you know all the parameters you wanted
21:40There's really no limit on how much data you can store in a table
21:45So with that said
21:45that should give you a good introduction to DATs
21:48and what I hope you're starting to see is that
21:51how using little pieces of functionality from each family
21:55we're starting to to add the
21:57the complexity of our networks up
21:58You know we have a little bit of
21:59TOPs here that are doing some compositing and
22:01and rendering of
22:02of two D objects
22:04We have you know
22:05a handful of DATs here holding some data
22:08then they get converted into CHOPs
22:10We know how CHOPs
22:10we can use them to kind of smooth out values
22:13We have another set of DATs here
22:15We made a little controller for our
22:16our presets here using some comps and some CHOPs
22:20So as we get through more and more
22:22and as you kind of explore TouchDesigner more and more
22:25that's really gonna be a big thing
22:26You're gonna always want to try
22:28and take your idea
22:29and think about how the simplest blocks
22:34that could make that idea would look like
22:37You know if you think
22:38Oh I have particles flying around
22:40and they're doing all kinds of crazy stuff
22:42you really wanna drill down and say
22:44Okay well how are the particles doing their thing
22:46What color are they
22:47Where did they come from
22:48What's the emitter
22:50Is there an attractor
22:51You always wanna break things down into the smallest possible
22:54like little idea bricks
22:56because that'll make it easier for you when you're trying to build these networks
22:59Because then what you're gonna do is just use
23:00a lot of the small little tools
23:02a lot of little operators all chained together doing little things
23:05and you'll end up with a cool app
23:08So with that said
23:09let's move on to our next operator family

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