Category Archives: Software

textport for performance | TouchDesiger

consoleText

I love a good challenge, and today on the TouchDesigner slack channel there was an interesting question about how you might go about getting the contents of the textport into a texture to display. That’s a great question, and I can imagine a circumstance where that might be a fun and interesting addition to a set. Sadly, I have no idea about how you might make that happen. I looked through the wiki a bit to see if there were any leads, and it’s difficult to see if there’s actually a good way to grab the contents of the textport.

What do we do then?!

Well, it just so happens that this might be another great place to look at how to take advantage of using extensions in TouchDesigner. Here our extension is going to do some double duty for us. The big picture idea is that we’ll want to be able to use a single call to either display a string, or print and display a string. If you only wanted to print it you could just use print(), so we’ll leave that one out of the mix for now.

Let’s take a look at the extension and then pull apart what’s happening in side.

Okay, so what exactly are we doing here?!

The big picture is that we want a way to be able to log something to a text object that can be displayed. In this case I choose a table DAT. The reasoning here is that a table DAT before being converted to just a text DAT allows us to do some simple clean up and line adjustments. Each new entry is posted in a row – which makes for an easy way to limit the number of displayed rows. We can do this with a select DAT – which is where we use our StartRow and EndRow members.

Why exactly do we use these? Well, this helps ensure that we can keep our newest row displayed. A text TOP can accept a text DAT of any length, but at some point the text will spill off the bottom – unless you use adaptive sizing. The catch there is that at some point the text will become impossible to read. A top and bottom boundary ensures that we can always have something portion of our text displayed. We use a simple logical test in our Display() method to see if we’ve hit that boundary yet, and if we have we can update our members plus one… moving them both along at the same time.

You may also notice that we have a separate method to display and print… why not just do this in a single method. Well, that’s a great question. We could just use a single method for this with another argument. That’s probably a better way to tackle this challenge, but I wanted to use this opportunity to show how we might call another method from within our class. This can be helpful in a number of different situations, and while this application is a little too simple to really take advantage of that technique, it gives you a peak into how it might work.

Want to download the tox and take it for a test drive? You can find the source code here.

TouchDesigner @ Yale | Your First VJ Deck

These videos are from a larger two day workshop that was offered at Yale in January of 2017. You can find all of the materials form the workshop here.

Building a Calibration UI | Reusing Palette Components – The Stoner | TouchDesigner

Here’s our second stop in a series about planning out part of a long term installation’s UI. We’ll focus on looking at the calibration portion of this project, and while that’s not very sexy, it’s something I frequently set up gig after gig – how you get your projection matched to your architecture can be tricky, and if you can take the time to build something reusable it’s well worth the time and effort. In this case we’ll be looking at a five sided room that uses five projectors. In this installation we don’t do any overlapping projection, so edge blending isn’t a part of what we’ll be talking about in this case study

stoner

As many of you have already found there’s a wealth of interesting examples and useful tools tucked away in the palette in touch designer. If you’re unfamiliar with this feature, it’s located on the left hand side of the interface when you open touch, and you can quickly summon it into existence with the small drawer and arrow icon:

pallet

Tucked away at the bottom of the tools list is the stoner. If you’ve never used the stoner it’s a killer tool for all your grid warping needs. It allows for key stoning and grid warping, with a healthy set of elements that make for fast and easy alterations to a given grid. You can bump points with the keyboard, you can use the mouse to scroll around, there are options for linear curves, bezier curves, persepective mapping, and bilinear mapping. It is an all around wonderful tool. The major catch is that using the tox as is runs you about 0.2 milliseconds when we’re not looking at the UI, and about 0.5 milliseconds when we are looking at the UI. That’s not bad, in fact that’s a downright snappy in the scheme of things, but it’s going to have limitations when it comes to scale, and using multiple stoners at the same time.

stoner

That’s slick. But what if there was a way to get almost the same results at a cost of 0 milliseconds for photos, and only 0.05 milliseconds when working with video? As it turns out, there’s a gem of a feature in the stoner that allows us to get just this kind of performance, and we’re going to take a look at how that works as well as how to take advantage of that feature.

stoner_fast

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the stoner itself. We can see now that there’s a second outlet on our op. Let’s plug in a null to both outlets and see what we’re getting.

stoner_nulls

Well hello there, what is this all about?!

Our second output is a 32 bit texture made up of only red and green channels. Looking closer we can see that it’s a gradient of green in the top left corner, and red in the bottom right corner. If we pause here for a moment we can look at how we might generate a ramp like this with a GLSL Top.

glsl_vuvst

If you’re following along at home, let’s start by adding a GLSL Top to our network. Next we’ll edit the pixel shader.

out vec4 fragColor;

void main()
{
 fragColor = vec4( vUV.st , 0.0 , 1.0 );
}

So what do we have here exactly? For starters we have an explicit declaration of our out vec4 (in very simple terms – our texture that we want to pass out of the main loop); a main loop where we assign values to our output texture.

What’s a vec4?

In GLSL vectors are a data type. We use vectors for all sorts of operations, and as a datatype they’re very useful to us as we often want variable with several positions. Keeping in mind that GLSL is used in pixeltown (one of the largest burrows on your GPU), it’s helpful to be able to think of variables that carry multiple values – like say information about a red, green, blue, and alpha value for a given pixel. In fact, that’s just what our vec4 is doing for us here, it represents the RGBA values we want to associate with a given pixel.

vUV is an input variable that we can use to locate the texture coordinate of a pixel. This value changes for every pixel, which is part of the reason it’s so useful to us. So what is this whole vec4( vUV.st, 0.0, 1.0) business? In GL we can fill in the values of a vec4 with a vec2 – vUV.st is our uv coordinate as a vec2. In essence what we’ve done is say that we want to use the uv coordinates to stand in for our red and green values, blue will always be 0, and our alpha will always be 1. It’s okay if that’s a wonky to wrap your head around at the moment. If you’re still scratching your head you can read more at links below

Read about more GLSL Data Types

Read about writing your own GLSL TOP

Okay, so we’ve got this silly gradient, but what is it good for?!

Let’s move around our stoner a little bit to see what else changes here.

pushingpoints

That’s still not very sexy – I know, but let’s hold on for just one second. We first need to pause for a moment and think about what this might be good for. In fact, there’s a lovely operator that this plays very nicely with. The remap TOP. Say what now? The remap top can be used to warp input1 based on a map in input2. Still scratching your head? That’s okay. Let’s plugin a few other ops so we can see this in action. We’re going to rearrange our ops here just a little and add a remap TOP to the mix.

Here we can see that the red / green map is used on the second input our our remap top, and our movie file is used on the first input.

Okay. But why is this anything exciting?

Richard Burns just recently wrote about remapping, and he very succinctly nails down exactly why this is so powerful:

It’s commonly used by people who use the stoner component as it means they can do their mapping using the stoners render pipeline and then simply remove the whole mapping tool from the system leaving only the remap texture in place.

If you haven’t read his post yet it’s well worth a read, and you can find it here.

Just like Richard mentions we can use this new feature to essentially completely remove or disable the stoner in our project once we’ve made maps for all of our texture warping. This is how we’ll get our cook time down to just 0.05 milliseconds.

Let’s look at how we can use the stoner to do just this.

For starters we need to add some empty bases to our network. To keep things simple for now I’m just going to add them to the same part of the network where my stoner lives. I’m going to call them base_calibration1 and base_calibration2.

calibration_bases

Next we’re going to take a closer look at the stoner’s custom parameters. On the Stoner page we can see that there’s now a place to put a path for a project.

stoner_path

Let’s start by putting in the path to our base_calibration1 component. Once we hit enter we should see that our base_calibration1 has new set of inputs and outputs:

base_capture1_added

Let’s take a quick look inside our component to see what was added.

Ah ha! Here we’ve got a set of tables that will allow the stoner UI to update correctly, and we’ve got a locked remap texture!

So, what do we do with all of this?

Let’s push around the corners of our texture in the stoner and hook up a few nulls to see what’s happening here.

working_with_calibration1

You may need to toggle the “always refresh” parameter on the stoner to get your destination project to update correctly. Later on we’ll look at how to work around this problem.

So far so good. Here we can see that our base_calibration1 has been updated with the changes we made to the stoner. What happens if we change the project path now to be base_calibration2? We should see that inputs and outputs are added to our base. We should also be able to make some changes to the stoner UI and see a two different calibrations.

Voila! That’s pretty slick. Better yet if we change the path in the stoner project parameter we’ll see that the UI updates to reflect the state we left our stoner in. In essence, this means that you can use a single stoner to calibrate multiple projectors without needing multiple stoners in your network. In fact, we can even bypass or delete the stoner from our project once we’re happy with the results.

no_stoner

There are, of course, a few things changes that we’ll make to integrate this into our project’s pipeline but understanding how this works will be instrumental in what we build next. Before we move ahead take some time to look through how this works, read through Richard’s post as well as some of the other documentation. Like Richard mentions, this approach to locking calibration data can be used in lots of different configurations and means that you can remove a huge chunk of overhead from your projects.

Next we’ll take the lessons we’ve learned here combined with the project requirements we laid out earlier to start building out our complete UI and calibration pipeline.

Building a Calibration UI | Software Architecture | TouchDesigner

Here’s our first stop in a series about planning out part of a long term installation’s UI. We’ll focus on looking at the calibration portion of this project, and while that’s not very sexy, it’s something I frequently set up gig after gig – how you get your projection matched to your architecture can be tricky, and if you can take the time to build something reusable it’s well worth the time and effort. In this case we’ll be looking at a five sided room that uses five projectors. In this installation we don’t do any overlapping projection, so edge blending isn’t a part of what we’ll be talking about in this case study.

Big Ideas

Organization Matters

How you build a thing matters. Ask any architect, chef, crafts person, quilter, and on and on and on. The principles and ideas that drive how you’re building your network matter, and as a full disclaimer I am a misery to collaborate with when it comes to messy TouchDesigner networks and messy directories. “As long as it works, it doesn’t matter Matt!” Is the mantra I often hear as a push back to my requests for organized work. There’s a lot of truth in that, but if you ever have to work with another person (or work with your future self) then the organization of your work will matter. Cluttered, messy, or disorganized structures will make a world of misery for you and your collaborators. You can do whatever you want at the end of the day, but my strong recommendation is that you create some guiding principles for your organization structures, network layout, documentation, and pending todo items on a project.

Here are some of my simple suggestions:

Turn off node resizing for TOPs and COMPs, and don’t resize your nodes by hand:

What? Why? Those things might make perfect sense to you, and you might like them a lot – and that’s great. I hate them in my networks because they insert irregularities into the flow of the network that spoof importance. When I look at a network and there is a single node that’s larger, smaller, resized in anyway that’s different from the surrounding nodes it implies to me that it has some significance or importance. It might well be that you just needed a closer look for a second and then forgot to change its size again, but for the person looking at your code for the first time that it is significant – even if it’s not. Time and again I’ve seen that kind of use of resizing throw off myself, and many of programmers that I respect.

If you need to use size as a defining characteristic in your networks, then use python to make nodes consistent sizes. It all goes back to being organized and consistent. Help your future self, or the other people you’re working with avoid as much confusion as possible… chances are the project is already confusing enough.

resizing

Align your ops:

I like the left bottom corner of my ops aligned with the network grid. I like to start new ops on new grid lines, and I like a full grid line of vertical space between ops. I also like to arrange ops (when possible) so that wires don’t cross unnecessarily. OCD much Matt? Sure, you can say that if you like. For me, the truth of the matter is that I like tidy networks where I can quickly see the flow of operations left to right. Too much space and things feel spread out all over creation, too little space and it can be difficult to see a network’s operation when you’re zoomed out too far. For me, this is the right kind of balance. It might well be different for you, and that’s wonderful. My only encouragement here is to be purposeful. Whatever you do, make sure it’s a choice you’re making not just the happenstance layout that emerged from the creative process. Be messy, be wild, place nodes every which way … but tidy up before you save and commit your work for the day.

alignment

Color code sparingly

I love me some color coding, but make sure it’s done purposefully and give yourself a key. This is another situation where color coding is often a great idea on the face of it, and then it quickly changes into something you can hardly keep track of. That’s okay, and my experience has taught me that less is better in this regard.

Leave those op names alone and only append after the op name

It took a lot to get me on board for this, but it’s now something that I’m whole wholeheartedly behind. Leaving the original operator name in place and only appending after is a tremendous help when it comes to quickly glancing at a network. It helps the viewer know quickly what an operator is doing without having to do any additional inspection.

“I don’t get it Matt.”

That’s okay. Let’s look at this example:

names_nightmare

In 2 seconds or less can you tell if the first operator with the banana is a select or a moviefilein TOP? Can you tell if the composited image is a comp TOP or a multiply TOP? Can you tell if the TOP labeled “done” is a null or an out TOP?

Compare that with:

names

To be fair, the names aren’t nearly as exciting, but they do make it much easier to understand what’s happening at a glance.

Like it or not, you’re an engineer now

As much as we all might like to fancy ourselves Artists with capital letter As and a filigree flourish, the truth is that right now you’re an engineer. That’s not to say that you’re not an artist too, you are; but some problems don’t need artful solutions, they need thoughtfully engineered solutions based on a complex understanding of computation and computer science. The more you work in TouchDesigner, the more you’ll find that you’re as much engineer as you are artist – that’s not only okay, that’s an important realization to make about your own work. It can be a bifurcating moment to feel at conflict with the art, and the mechanics of a given network – “this approach is beautiful and it works but costs 20 milliseconds” is probably not a viable solution. It’s especially not a viable solution for something like a calibration pipeline that needs to have as little computational overhead as possible. The work that goes into an efficient process isn’t always glamorous, or much to show off; instead, it makes room for the art with a capital A to take more cycles and be more expressive.

Lucky for us, there’s room to be both engineer and artist in our work. Remember to embrace both of those roles, even when faced with the frustration of complex logic problems, or when faced with the questions of aesthetics.

Externalizing Files

So we should externalize files? Yes. For the love of god, yes. If you believe in a world where you don’t tear your hair out, yes. In case you still are wondering, the answer is yes – you should always look for ways to externalize files.

Why? That seems silly.

Once upon a time I didn’t externalize any components, and my projects lived as complete toe files and the world was beautiful. Then I crashed my project because I did something silly, and then it took me hours to track down where the problem was… even opening the crashautosave.toe left me slowly moving through networks in networks trying to figure out what I had done where to make everything crash. Worse yet, because it was just a single toe file there was no way to unit test any of the smaller modules. Open, change, save, open crash… repeat. If you haven’t had this experience yet, it’s only a matter of time.You too will crash one day, and mightily. You’ll wonder why you ever wanted to work with computers in the first place, and why you don’t just open up a bar in on a sandy beach somewhere.

Snark aside, externalizing components in your network has several benefits. For starters, it moves you away from having a single toe file black box that’s difficult to test or debug. Separating out smaller modules allows for more portability between the applications that you build, and it means that you can test just that module. It also means that you can update just that module and not your entire toe file.

Externalizing modules, extensions, and the like also lets you more easily compare files over time if you’re using a piece of version control software – don’t worry, we’ll talk about git in just a second. It also makes it easier to work with text files in something like sublime (my favorite) or Visual Studio Code. That might not seem like a big deal now, but the more you work with extensions and python, the more you’ll want robust text editing tools at your finger tips.

Externalizing files also reduces bloat in your toe file. If you’ve ever locked a texture in your toe file you know all to well that it your slim file size can quickly balloon. External files also makes it easier to save and try multiple configurations. We’re going to work on a building a calibration UI, we might want to be able to save a calibration configuration and then try another calibration. The same goes for configuration files. Rather than a configuration that’s locked into your toe file, an external file can make it easy to load lots of different configurations or other settings.

It might well seem like I’m belaboring this point, and I’m doing that on purpose. Working with external files is more work, takes more organization, takes better planning, and requires a more meticulous approach – but if you want to grow as a developer and programmer, you’ll wrestle with this challenge sooner or later. I’d encourage you to do that sooner rather than later.

git

What is git? Direct from the git website :

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. It outclasses SCM tools like Subversion, CVS, Perforce, and ClearCase with features like cheap local branching, convenient staging areas, and multiple workflows.

But what does that mean?! Unlike working with art where a tool like Dropbox would be helpful, when we’re developing software it’s often more helpful to be have some specific means of specifying when a file needs to be saved (probably with the same name), along with a message about what our changes have done. Let’s say we’re working on our calibration UI, we’ve made a change that now allows us to save out our calibration configuration. That’s great, but it’s come at the cost of changing a piece of how our UI works. We know for sure that the old way works 100% of the time, and we’re pretty sure that our new way works at least 80% of the time. Git allows us to check in the new version of our software, commit it to our working directory structure, and make a note of what we did.

We’re smart programmers, so we’ve also started to externalize our files. This means that we’ve separated out parts of our network responsible for different tasks. With git we’re now able to check in only the single tox that’s changed while we’ve been working. Better yet, we can even work with another person. Developer 1 might be working on one part of our project, while Developer 2 is working on another. Both developers are saving their respective tox files, and git allows us to track that progress and merge work seamlessly. If we do end up editing the same files, we end up with a merge conflict… which means what Matt? A merge conflict means just that, two files are competing for the same place in our directory, and we need to review them in order to decide which file to keep.

Git also allows us to work in multiple branches on our project.

Huh?

Let’s imagine that we find a bug, we might want to create a branch in our code to deal with resolving this bug.

Why?

Well, let us imagine a situation familiar to us all. We find a bug, squash it mightily. Only to discover that our fix has created another problem… maybe a much bigger problem. The little bug that we killed we could have worked with, but now we have a show stopper bug running a muck, that we don’t know how to stop, and the show starts in 45 minutes. Trouble shooting in another branch allows you to make fixes and then integrate them back into your project when you’re confident that they don’t create other problems.

Best of all, git creates a history that let’s us step back through each one of our commits. At any point we can return to a past state of our project. Taking advantage of modular design and externalized files makes this even more powerful because it means that with a little work we can resurrect ideas that might otherwise have been lost or discarded.

That’s a big commercial for git so far, but no cautionary tales – an cautionary tales there are plenty of. While git is a phenomenal tool, it can be a bit beastly to wrangle when you’re first starting – know that you’ll get frustrated, know that you’ll curse it, know that you’ll want to give up on using it, then count to 10 and give it another go. Like all things you’re unfamiliar with, take your time to get used to it as a tool set. You might choose to start by using a GUI tool, but at some point you should learn some of the commands to run directly from the command line. You’ll also want to avoid checking in any of your assets. These days I divide up my projects and separate my assets from my code. I have a few exceptions for this practice, but I try to keep them few and far between – only really allowing for template files, or grids. Essentially, I try to make sure that it’s only files that are going to change in frequently.

If you’re going to use git, you’ll probably also use something like github or bitbucket. These are great services and host your code online so you can get to it from anywhere. These services also come with some great tools for making action items, bug tracking, and maintaining documentation for your project. Take advantage of these tools.

learn more about git at https://git-scm.com/
start using git with github or bitbucket

See more comics from XKCD at https://xkcd.com/

Extensions Everywhere

I’ve talked plenty of about extensions, how to use them, and what they’re good for. I’ve had some spirited discussions about when to use Extensions vs. Modules, and there’s a healthy conversation to be had there for those who want to really get into the weeds of it all. The place I’ve finally landed is this – I use extensions anytime I want to extend the capabilities of a given component. Case to case the degree of extension varies – sometimes I take fuller advantage of using classes than others, and that’s okay. To me, it’s okay if I don’t always take complete advantage of the difference between Extensions and Modules. Sticking with extensions means choosing an approach that works for 99% of the use cases where I need more flexibility in my programming. For mean that means a little bit of stability from the Touch paradigm where there are almost always at least a handful of different ways to solve the same problem. You might like Modules better, and that’s okay. In this case study, however, we’ll see the use of Extensions.

We’ll also see a move away from fragmenting our code across our network. It’s often tempting to use a button deep down in a UI somewhere to perform a logical operation. The only catch is that now that script is buried deep down in your project somewhere, and should it ever give you problems, good luck finding it. For the most part, on large projects I aim to keep the lion share of my operations focused in an extension. This takes a little more time to write, but it means that things are more organized, easier to diff between check ins, that I can change my code in a single place, and that I’m writing functions that are callable from other parts of the network. In my experience so far, this little amount of extra work makes for a larger savings across the whole project.

More about Extensions
Python in TouchDesigner | Extensions
Understanding Extensions

documenting your code – what are docstrings?

I’m a broken record. I know, but really – leave yourself notes, voluminous ones. Better yet, when using extensions make sure to add some docstrings.

“What are docstrings?” you ask.

I’m so glad you did! Docstrings are a feature in several programming languages that allow you to embed comments or information into your code that can be inspected at run time. If you’re still scratching your head that’s okay. Let’s look at an example, this one is from the wikipedia page about docstrings:

"""
Assuming this is file mymodule.py, then this string, being the
first statement in the file, will become the "mymodule" module's
docstring when the file is imported.
"""

class MyClass(object):
    """The class's docstring"""

    def my_method(self):
        """The method's docstring"""

def my_function():
    """The function's docstring"""

“Great. But why are these useful?”

There useful in lots of ways but for me they have some special importance. For starters, they help ensure that I’m documenting my code as I go. The more tips you leave yourself along the way, the happier you’ll be in the long run. It does make your code longer, and it does take more time. But, if you’re really invested in building something reusable that you can come back to and refine over time, these are solid investments to make that process smoother in the future.

You can get to these notes from anywhere. This internal documentation can be called from anywhere in the network, so if you’ve forgotten how many arguments your method takes, or what it is supposed to return you can get some quick answers without having to track down the extension. When you start to write lots of complex methods this can become a real help. It’s probably not something you need when you’re first working on the project, but if you’re collaborating with someone else or coming back to your project over time it’ll be well worth the time and effort.

Finally worth considering is that docstrings are a part of the larger Python style guide. Like it or not you’re an engineer, and at this point you’re turning into a budding Python programmer. Learning about the best practices of other programmers outside of the TouchDesigner silo helps broaden your perspective and exposes you to how other people work. For better or worse I spent a lot of time in the liberal arts, and one of the core tenants of the ideology that underpins the arts is that exposure to other ideas and perspectives is important in its own right. I’ve carried this with me through life, and I think even in the cases of programming languages it’s worth considering. The conventions and practices of any community teaches you about how they think of the world – how it’s organized, how it aught to work, how that group values the world, or what they don’t value. The Python community is one that we participate in, even if only mostly from our gray network of operators.

learn more about docstrings
see google’s python style guide for docstrings

Mapping out our Project

You know the saying – measure twice, cut once.

Before digging in to a new project make sure you ask a lot of questions, map out as many details as possible, and make a plan.

Okay, so what about our project?

For starters

We know that we’ll have five projectors and one monitor that acts as a UI.
We know the resolution of all of our displays.
We know that we’ll externalize lots of files in our network.
We know that we’re going to use git as our version control system.
We know that we are going to work with other people.
We know that we need to document our work.
We know that we’ll need a way to control warping for the five different displays
We know that we’ll need a few other controls – both for the mapping, and also to make space for the future UI elements to control playback.
We know we need to previs the layout.
We know that we’re looking to build out a complete application with all of the features that you might expect from that kind of build.

Whew! Okay, so where do we start? Before we start throwing down ops let’s think through a plan.

We’ll need a container that holds our UI, we’ll also need a container for each of our displays. We know that it’s best to just use a single perform window that spans multiple monitors, so we should make sure we plan for that when we’re developing our project.

We also need to think about how we’re going to set up rendering our scene so we can previs it without turning on all the projectors. That will mean a multi camera set up and some live rendering.

We should also think about how we might ingest video to display for calibration and test playback. On top of that we should also build out a test module to help the creative programmer understand the correct formatting for how to work in the framework we’ve created.

We should also plan to make some space in our build to house assets that are needed across our network, as well as a place to keep our calibration data. We’ll take advantage of the stoner, so we better make some time to pull that apart and better understand how it works.

We’ll use a few set of extensions, so we should also make sure that we know how that works before we dig in too deep.

Finally, we should make sure we know how git works, since we’re going to use that along the way.

We’re bound to run into some other things we need to suss out as we go, but this should give us a solid starting point in terms of understanding the project from a distance.

Next we’ll take a closer look at the stoner to make sure we understand this component we’re going to use, then we’ll dig in and start building.

Exploring Examples from the Forum| TouchDesigner

capture

https://github.com/raganmd/td_fb_forum_examples

New TouchDesigner tool for those of you looking to meander through some examples.

Pull this whole repo and find example_explorer.toe in:{your_local_directory}\td_fb_forum_examples\example_explorer

All the examples I’ve collected appear as a list on the far left, read me docs display in the middle viewer, and the example network shows up on the right.

For right now, use the “h” key to home the network when you load a new tox. Tracking down the right way to have that happen automatically – coming soon.

As a bonus this has a functioning list comp that you’re welcome to pillage.

Only a single example is loaded at a time to try and keep things optimized.

If you’re teaching a course and could benefit from re-purposing this network design for assignments or examples please feel free.

Python in TouchDesigner | Modules | TouchDesigner

There are a number of ways that we might use modules on demand in TouchDesigner. Before we get too far along, however, we might first ask “what is a module on demand?”

According to the TouchDesigner wiki:

The MOD class provides access to Module On Demand object, 
which allows DATs to be dynamically imported as modules. 
It can be accessed with the mod object, found in the automatically 
imported td module. 

Alternatively, one can use the regular python statement: import. 
Use of the import statement is limited to modules in the search path, 
where as the mod format allows complete statements in one line, 
which is more useful for entering expressions. Also note that DAT modules 
cannot be organized into packages as regular file system based 
python modules can be.

What does this mean? It’s hard to sum up in just a single sentence, but the big thing to take away is that we can essentially use any text DAT to hold whole functions for us that we can then call whenever we want.

Let’s take a closer look at this process. We’ll start with some simple ideas, then work our way up to something a little more complicated.

First we turn things way down, and just think about storing variables. To be clear, we probably wouldn’t use this in a project, but it can be helpful for us when we’re trying to understand what exactly is going on here.

Let’s create a new text DAT and call it “text_variables”, inside let’s put the following text:

width       = 1280
height      = 720

budget      = 'small'

Using the mod class we can access these variables in other operators! To do this we’ll use the following syntax:

mod( 'text_variables' ).width
mod( 'text_variables' ).height
mod( 'text_variables' ).budget

Try adding a constant CHOP, and a text TOP to your network and using the expressions above to retrieve these values.

Next try printing these values:

print( mod( 'text_variables' ).width )
print( mod( 'text_variables' ).height )
print( mod( 'text_variables' ).budget )

So, it looks like we can access the contents of a module as a means of storing variables. That’s hip. Let’s take a moment and circle back to one of the other use cases that we’ve already seen for a module. More than just a single value, we can also put a whole dictionary in a module and then call it on demand. We’ve already done this in some of our previous examples, but we can take a quick look at that process again to make sure we understand.

Let’s create a new text DAT called “text_dictionary_as_module”, inside of this text DAT let’s define the following dictionary:

fruit = {
    "apple" : 10,
    "orange"    : 5,
    "kiwi"  : 16
}

Let’s first print the whole dictionary object:

print( mod( 'text_dictionary_as_module' ).fruit )

Alternatively, we can also access individual keys in the dictionary:

mod( 'text_dictionary_as_module' ).fruit[ 'apple' ]
mod( 'text_dictionary_as_module' ).fruit[ 'orange' ]
mod( 'text_dictionary_as_module' ).fruit[ 'kiwi' ]

What can you do with this?! Well, you might store your config file in a text DAT that you can call from a module on demand. You might use this to store configuration variables for your UI – colors, fonts, etc. ; you might decide to use this to configure some portion of a network, or to hold on to data that you want to recall later; or really any number of things.

Before we get too excited about storing variables in modules on demand, let’s look at an even more powerful feature that will help us better understand where they really start to shine.

Up next we’re going to look at writing a simple function that we can use as a module on demand. In addition to writing some simple little functions, we’re also going to embrace docstrings – a feature of the python language that makes documenting your work easier. Docstings allow us to leave behind some notes for our future selves, or other programmers. One of the single most powerful changes you can make to how you work is to document your code. It’s a difficult practice to establish, and can be frustrating to maintain – but it is hands down one of the most important changes you can make in how you work.

Alright, I’ll get off my documentation soapbox for now. Let’s write a few methods and see how this works in TouchDesigner.

We can start by creating a new text DAT called “text_simple_reutrn”, inside of this DAT we’ll write out our new functions:

Great! But what can we do with these? We can start by using some eval DATs or print statements to see what we’ve got. I’m going to use eval DATs. Let’s add several to our network and try out some calls to our new module on demand. First let’s look at the generic syntax:

mod( name_of_text_dat ).name_of_method

In practice that will look like:

mod( 'text_simple_reutrn' ).multi_by_two( 5 )
mod( 'text_simple_reutrn' ).multi_by_two( 2.5524 )
mod( 'text_simple_reutrn' ).logic_test( 5 )
mod( 'text_simple_reutrn' ).logic_test( 6 )
mod( 'text_simple_reutrn' ).logic_test_two( "TouchDesigner" )

Now we can see that we wrote several small functions that we can then call from anywhere, as long as we know the path to the text DAT we’re using as a module on demand! Here’s where we start to really unlock the potential of modules on demand. As we begin to get a better handle on the kind of function we might write / need for a project we can begin to better understand how to take full advantage of this feature in TouchDesiger.

Doc Strings

Since we took the time to write out all of those doc strings, let’s look at how we might be able to print them out! Part of what’s great about doc strings is that there’s a standard way to retrieve them, and therefore to print them. This means that you can quickly get a some information about your function printed right in the text port. Let’s take a closer look by printing out the doc stings for all of our functions:

That worked pretty well! But looking back at this it seems like we repeated a lot of work. We just learned about for loops, so let’s look at how we could do the same thing with a loop instead:

A Practical Example

This is all fun and games, but what can we do with this? There are any number of functions you might write for a project, but part of what’s exciting here is the ability to write something re-usable in Python. What might that look like? Well, let’s look at an example of a logger. There are a number of events we might want to log in TouchDesigner when we have a complex project.

In our case we’ll write out a method that allows a verbose or compact message, a way to print it to the text port or not, and a way to append a file or not. Alright, here goes:

So now that we’ve written out the method, what would call for this look like?

operator = me

message ='''
Just a friendly message from your TouchDesigner Network.
Anything could go here, an error message an init message.

You dream it up, and it'll print
'''

# print and append log file with a verbose log message
mod( 'text_module1' ).Log_message( operator, message, verbose = True )

# print and append log file with a compact log message
# mod( 'text_module1' ).Log_message( operator, message )


# append log file with verbose log message
# mod( 'text_module1' ).Log_message( operator, message, verbose = True, text_port_print = False )


# print a compact log message
# mod( 'text_module1' ).Log_message( operator, message, append_log = False )

Take a moment to look at the example network and then un-comment a line at a time in the text DAT with the script above. Take note of how things are printed in the text port, or how they’re appended to a file. This is our first generalized function that has some far reaching implications for our work in touch. Here we’ve started with a simple way to log system events, both to a file and to the text port. This is also a very re-usable piece of code. There’s nothing here that’s highly specific to this project, and with a little more thought we could turn this into a module that could be dropped into any project.

Local Modules

We’ve learned a lot so far about modules on demand, but the one glaring shortcoming here is that we need the path to the text DAT in question. That might not be so bad in some cases, but in complex networks writing a relative path might be complicated, and using an absolute path might be limiting. What can we do to solve this problem. We’re in luck, as there’s one feature of modules we haven’t looked at just yet. We can simplify the calling / locating of modules with a little extra organization.

First we need to add a base and rename it to “local”, inside of this base add another base and rename it to “modules”. Perfect. I’m going to reuse one of our existing code examples so we can see a small change in syntax here. I’ve also changed the name of the text DAT inside of local>modules to “simple_return”.

mod.simple_return.multi_by_two( 5 )
mod.simple_return.multi_by_two( 2.5524 )
mod.simple_return.logic_test( 5 )
mod.simple_return.logic_test( 6 )
mod.simple_return.logic_test_two( "TouchDesigner" )
mod.simple_return.logic_test_two( 10 )

Looking at the above, we can see that we were able to remove the parentheses after “mod”. But what else changed? Why is this any better? The benefit to placing this set of functions in local>modules is that as long as you’re inside of this component, you no longer need to use a path to locate the module you’re looking for.

Alright, now it’s time for you to take these ideas out for a test drive and see what you can learn.

Python in TouchDesigner | Data Structures – Dictionaries | TouchDesigner

Part 1 Core Concepts

Dictionaries – a structure and a concept
Looking at Dictionaries and Lists side by side
What are key value pairs
Retrieving values from dictionaries
Retrieving .keys() and .values()
Adding items to dictionaries
Nested data structures
A better text formatting approach with .format() (a big thank you to Willy Nolan for setting me on the right path with text formatting in Python 3)

Part 2 Core Concepts

Dictionaries – a structure and a concept
A practical look at dictionaries in TouchDesigner
Nested data structures – dictionaries in dictionaries
Using Dictionaries as a preset structure
Using Python to set parameters
Using Python variables in scripts to generalize our code

This isn’t the first time I’ve been on a tear about using Dictionaries in TouchDesigner – THP 494 & 598, Presets. That said, sometimes it’s easier to understand a concept if we back down a little bit and start from the beginning. With that in mind, let’s turn the speed down to 0.1 before we turn it up to 12 again.

Dictionaries are another type of data structure that we can use in Python. They’re similar to lists in that we can store information in them, and retrieve them easily. Dictionaries, however, are distinctly different from lists. Where lists are index based – which is to say that they have a specific order – dictionaries are key based.

What does that mean, and why do we care?! We think of dictionaries as being a pair of things a key, and a value. We might think of this as a name and its corresponding piece of information. Let’s look at something simple to get started. To get started let’s go back to our grocery example when we were talking about lists. In making a list for our trip to the grocery store we listed all of the items we needed from the store. We didn’t however, make any notes about quantity. Let’s quickly make that list again:

grocery_list = [ 'eggs' , 'milk' , 'bread' , 'butter' , 'coffee' ]

This is great, and it tells us lots of information, but maybe not all of the information we need. If I’m going to the store myself, this is a fine list. If I’m asking someone else to pick up these things for me, well then I need at least one other piece of information – quantity. If we’re using lists, we might do something clever, like make a list of lists with two items – the grocery item, and the desired quantity. That might look something like this:

grocery_list = [ 
    ['eggs' , '1 dozen' ] , 
    ['milk' , '1 pint' ] , 
    ['bread' , '2 loaves' ] , 
    ['butter' , '1 lb' ] , 
    ['coffee', '2 lbs' ]
]

This works fine, and might be a great way to hold onto this information. We can, however, use a dictionary to do this same thing. In this case we’re going to think of our grocery items as a keys, and quantities as values. Let’s look at what means:

grocery_list = {
    'eggs' : '1 dozen' , 
    'milk' : '1 pint' , 
    'bread' : '2 loaves' , 
    'butter' : '1 lb' , 
    'coffee': '2 lbs'
}

It’s important to note that I’ve used some indenting to make this easier to read, but another perfectly valid way to write this dictionary would be:

grocery_list = { 'eggs' : '1 dozen' , 'milk' : '1 pint' , 'bread' : '2 loaves', 'butter' : '1 lb' , 'coffee': '2 lbs' }

I just happen to think that anytime you can make something easier to read by a human, the better.

Okay, let’s talk about syntax here for a second. So the first thing we did was declare our dictionary as a variable. Next we used curly brackets to open our dictionary ( {} – these are curly brackets ). Next we wrote out our dictionary as key and value pairs separated by a colon – keys on the left, values on the right. Now in this example all of our values were strings, but they could just as easily have been integers, floats, booleans, lists, or even other dictionaries.

This is all well and good, but how do we get things out of our dictionary? We know how to retrieve things from a list, but a dictionary is a little different. When retrieving something from a dictionary we typically use a key. Let’s consider our first example again for a second. Let’s say we want to print out the quantity of eggs that we’re supposed to get from the store. We can do that like this:

print( grocery_list[ 'eggs' ] )

We can also retrieve the contests of dictionary with .keys() and .values():

print( grocery_list.keys() )
print( grocery_list.values() )

In both of these cases we get a list of keys or values.

It’s also important to know how to add items to our dictionary. There are a few ways to go about this, but let’s just look at one for now. We should start by creating an empty dictionary:

my_dictionary = {}

Now that we have an empty dictionary, we can add items to it. We do this by starting with the dictionary name, then placing the key in square brackets ([] these things), followed by an equal sign, and then what we want to be placed into the dictionary as the value. Let’s look at an example:

my_dictionary[ 'new_item1' ] = "cookies"

Okay, now that we’ve added one key value pair, let’s print out the keys and values in our list (to practice), and add a few more items:

my_dictionary = {}

my_dictionary[ 'new_item1' ] = "cookies"

print( my_dictionary.keys() )
print( my_dictionary.values() )

my_dictionary[ 'new_item2' ] = "cell_phones"

print( my_dictionary.keys() )
print( my_dictionary.values() )

my_dictionary[ 'new_item3' ] = 55

print( my_dictionary.keys() )
print( my_dictionary.values() )

my_dictionary[ 'new_item4' ] = [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]

print( my_dictionary.keys() )
print( my_dictionary.values() )

Wait… what did we just do there with item4?! Most of that should look pretty straightforward, and hopefully that makes sense for the most part. It is not, however, the most exciting part of using dictionaries. Dictionaries become the most exciting when we start to see how we can nest other lists or dictionaries inside of them.

Let’s look at a dictionary of mixed contents:

my_dictionary = { 
    "apple" : "these are delicious" , 
    "orange" : 12 , 
    "kiwi" : 55.5 , 
    "lots_of_things" : [
        "paper" , 
        "pens" ,
        44 , 
        10.4
    ] 
}

So we know how to get to the values associated with “apple” , “orange” , and “kiwi” , but how do we get to the contents of that list? Well, we can write something like this:

print( my_dictionary[ 'lots_of_things' ][ 0 ] )
print( my_dictionary[ 'lots_of_things' ][ 1 ] )
print( my_dictionary[ 'lots_of_things' ][ 2 ] )
print( my_dictionary[ 'lots_of_things' ][ 3 ] )

Here we see the same syntax that we use when retrieving list items.

That’s wonderful! So what about when we store dictionaries inside of dictionaries? Let’s look at a simple example. We can start by creating a dictionary with fruit’s as our keys. Each fruit will have a corresponding dictionary of quantity, origin, and if the fruit is organic. Okay, what would that look like:

my_dictionary_of_dictionaries = { 
    "apple" : {
        "quantity" : 10 ,
        "origin" : "Vermont" ,
        "organic" : True 
    } , 
    "orange" : {
        "quantity" : 20 ,
        "origin" : "California" ,
        "organic" : False
    } , 
    "kiwi" : {
        "quantity" : 26 ,
        "origin" : "Mexico" ,
        "organic" : False
    } , 
    "grapes" : {
        "quantity" : 50 ,
        "origin" : "Peru" ,
        "organic" : True
   }
}

That’s pretty snazzy and all, but how do we pull things out of this data structure? We can follow the example we learned with lists, but instead of using index values, we can instead use keys. Let’s look at just apple to get started:

print( "Let's just look at apple" )
print( "quanitity -" , my_dictionary_of_dictionaries[ 'apple' ][ 'quantity' ] )
print( "origin -" , my_dictionary_of_dictionaries[ 'apple' ][ 'origin' ] )
print( "organic -" , my_dictionary_of_dictionaries[ 'apple' ][ 'organic' ] )

Here we can see that we start with our dictionary, with a key in square brackets, followed by another key in square brackets. Practice retrieving other keys – what about grapes, or oranges? Also practice by adding other keys inside of the fruit dictionaries. Don’t forget to pay careful attention to where you’ve placed your commas and, remember that keys are strings so they need quotation marks.

Once you’ve done that, let’s consider how we might use something like a dictionary here in TouchDesigner. We’re going to look something a little complex, but still relatively simple to help us get our bearings. Dictionaries can be a great help to us when we want to do things like creating save states. Let’s first think about what it would mean to set the properties of a text TOP with the contents of a dictionary.

Let’s start by making our dictionary. I’m going to use the same names for our dictionary keys that we find in our parameter names – just to make sure we know exactly where a value is going.

top_dictionary = { 
    "text" : 'monkey' , 
    "fontsizex" : 15 ,
    "alignx" : 1 ,
    "aligny" : 1 ,
    "fontcolorr" : 1.0 ,
    "fontcolorg" : 0.0 ,
    "fontcolorb" : 0.0 ,
    "fontalpha" : 1.0 ,
    "bgcolorr" : 0.0 ,
    "bgcolorg" : 0.0 ,
    "bgcolorb" : 0.0 ,
    "bgalpha" : 1.0
}

Now let’s flesh out our script to change the parameters of our TOP:

target_text = op( 'text1' )

target_text.par.text = top_dictionary[ 'text' ]

target_text.par.fontsizex = top_dictionary[ 'fontsizex' ]
target_text.par.alignx = top_dictionary[ 'alignx' ]
target_text.par.aligny = top_dictionary[ 'aligny' ]
target_text.par.fontcolorr = top_dictionary[ 'fontcolorr' ]
target_text.par.fontcolorg = top_dictionary[ 'fontcolorg' ]
target_text.par.fontcolorb = top_dictionary[ 'fontcolorb' ]
target_text.par.fontalpha = top_dictionary[ 'fontalpha' ]
target_text.par.bgcolorr = top_dictionary[ 'bgcolorr' ]
target_text.par.bgcolorg = top_dictionary[ 'bgcolorg' ]
target_text.par.bgcolorb = top_dictionary[ 'bgcolorb' ]
target_text.par.bgalpha = top_dictionary[ 'bgalpha' ]

That’s pretty great – but goodness that’s a lot of work just to change some settings. How might we think about using this idea to create a preset system? We’re not that far off form this idea at this point, so let’s dig in a little deeper. To really make this work, we need to revisit our dictionary. Specifically, we need to encapsulate our presets inside another layer. We need to make them their own dictionary as a set of values for another key. For example, we might want a named structure like “preset1” , “preset2” etc. to be how we retrieve settings. Let’s change our dictionary to make that happen:

top_dictionary = { 
    "preset1" : {
        "text" : 'monkey' , 
        "fontsizex" : 15 ,
        "alignx" : 1 ,
        "aligny" : 1 ,
        "fontcolorr" : 1.0 ,
        "fontcolorg" : 0.0 ,
        "fontcolorb" : 0.0 ,
        "fontalpha" : 1.0 ,
        "bgcolorr" : 0.0 ,
        "bgcolorg" : 0.0 ,
        "bgcolorb" : 0.0 ,
        "bgalpha" : 1.0
    } ,
    "preset2" : {
        "text" : 'pig' , 
        "fontsizex" : 80 ,
        "alignx" : 1 ,
        "aligny" : 0 ,
        "fontcolorr" : 0.0 ,
        "fontcolorg" : 0.0 ,
        "fontcolorb" : 1.0 ,
        "fontalpha" : 1.0 ,
        "bgcolorr" : 1.0 ,
        "bgcolorg" : 1.0 ,
        "bgcolorb" : 1.0 ,
        "bgalpha" : 1.0
    }
}

Not bad. Now, how can apply these presets to our top? To do this we’re going to do one tricky thing. We’re going to write our scripts so that a python variable can stand in our first key. This will mean that we only need to change a single variable before re-running our script. That would look like this:

target_text = op( 'text1' )
dictionary_preset = 'preset2'

target_text.par.text = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'text' ]
target_text.par.fontsizex = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'fontsizex' ]
target_text.par.alignx = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'alignx' ]
target_text.par.aligny = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'aligny' ]
target_text.par.fontcolorr = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'fontcolorr' ]
target_text.par.fontcolorg = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'fontcolorg' ]
target_text.par.fontcolorb = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'fontcolorb' ]
target_text.par.fontalpha = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'fontalpha' ]
target_text.par.bgcolorr = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'bgcolorr' ]
target_text.par.bgcolorg = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'bgcolorg' ]
target_text.par.bgcolorb = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'bgcolorb' ]
target_text.par.bgalpha = top_dictionary[ dictionary_preset ][ 'bgalpha' ]

Alright. Looking closely at the above, we can see that we need only change the variable “dictionary_preset” in order to fetch a whole different set of values. Not bad, right?

Take some time to experiment with these ideas. As we head forward we’re going to start to look at how we can use executes and for loops to see how we can really start to make headway in using Python. We’ve laid a lot of ground work so we can really plow ahead.

Learn more about Python Data Structures

Download the sample files from github

THP 494 & 598 | The Table COMP | TouchDesigner

Core Concepts

How to feed the Table COMP
Table COMP structure and principles
Evaluate DAT
Panel Execute DAT
Table COMP customization
Getting values / actions out of the Table COMP

Understanding Referencing Part II | TouchDesigner

I love me some referencing. The more you work with TouchDesigner, the more you’ll find that you need a solid understanding of how referencing connects the various parts of your network. Better still is getting a better handle on how Python scripting works in TouchDesigner – especially dot notation. At the heart of what we’re after is making sure that our networks can start to feel a little more interconnected. Hard coding values makes for tedious programming, especially if you’re building something you’d like to reuse. By starting to think about how to build some logic into the system we’re making we begin to build reusable tools. If you’re still getting a handle on how referencing works, then it’s a good idea to get started here (Understanding Referencing) to get your bearings.

Let’s start with a simple example. I’ve got five images that I’d like to cycle through when I click a button. I know that I can use a Count CHOP and a Switch TOP to help with this but how can I make it so that my Count CHOP knows when I add another input to my Switch TOP? In a perfect world I could add or remove images or movies, and the network would just “know” what was going on, right? So how can we program something like this? Let’s start by taking a moment to visit my favorite part of working with TouchDesigner, the wiki. Specifically we need to look at our Switch TOP’s page.

The most important part of this page for us today is here at the top where it says “switchTOP_Class” next to the Python symbol. In object-oriented programming a class is a kind of “extensible template for creating objects.” The exciting part of knowing this is that a class comes with all sorts of methods and values that we can quickly call when scripting. With that in mind let’s take a closer look at the Switch TOP Class page. At this point you’re either beside yourself with excitement, or weeping with confusion. Let’s take a look at a quick example, and see if we can make some sense out of what we’re reading.

One of the first things on the Switch TOP Class page is a sentence that says “This class inherits from the TOP class.” This means that there are several things that work for the Switch TOP that also work for all TOPs. This means we can practice on a regular movie in TOP, and what we learn should also work for our Switch TOP. Okay, let’s open up a new network in TouchDesigner, and let’s add a movie in TOP and a Text DAT. We’ll also need to open up our Textport.

When you open your textport you should see a floating window that looks like this:

Great! With your Movie In TOP, Text DAT, and Textport you should be looking at something like this:

In our Text DAT we’re going to write a very simple little script that’s going to print in our textport. In Python we can print something to the textport with the command print(). Whatever we put in the parenthesis gets printed to the textport. You can practice this in the textport, just make sure that you use quotes around your text. For example:

print(“hello world”)

We can also complete this same operation using our text DAT. In the text DAT write:

print(“hello world”)

Now right click on the DAT, and select “Run Script” from the drop down menu. You should see the text appear in your textport:

Congratulations, you just ran a Python Script from a Text DAT. We’re going to use our ability to print to the textport to learn a few more things about our TOP class. We should still have a Movie In TOP in our network. My Movie In TOP is called “moviein1”, knowing the name of our operators is how we call point to them when we’re referencing. Looking back to the general TOP Class Wiki Page, I can see that there’s a member called width and one called height.

For this next step we’re going to use dot notation to get to the width and height information about our operator. For example, I can get that information by starting with the operator name, followed by a dot, followed by the member I want:

op(‘moviein1’).width

Let’s copy that exact line of code into our Text DAT. Next right click, and select Run Script. Nothing happened… what gives?! In this case, just because we asked for that value, doesn’t mean that TouchDesigner knew that we wanted it to be printed to the text port. In order to see these values in the textport we need to encapsulate our script in the print command. When you do this, you should have a script that looks like this:

print(op(‘moviein1’).width)

Now if you run the script you should see:

Let’s try one more. Let’s add one more line of code:

print(op(‘moviein1’).height)

Let’s run the script one more time and you should have something that looks like this:

Believe it or not, we just made some huge progress. Understanding how dot notation works gives you access to a HUGE treasure trove of information that you can use when scripting or writing references.

Let’s return to our example and see if we can’t use what we’ve just learned. Let’s start by adding a few things to our network. I’m going to add five Text TOPs, and I’m going to set them to be the numbers 1 – 5. Next I’m going to wire all of those to a Switch TOP, and then finally to a Null TOP,

Now let’s add a Text DAT to our network, and then take a quick moment to go back to our Switch TOP Class Page. Of particular interest to me is the Connections subsection:

Using what we just learned, write the following script into your text DAT:

print(op(‘switch1’).inputs)

When you run this script you should see something like this:

Well, that doesn’t look useful at all, does it? In fact, it’s tremendously useful! Python uses lists to store information, and what we’ve printed out is a list of connections to the Switch TOP. We don’t really want all of this information that we’re getting about the inputs, we just want to know how many connections there are. As luck would have it, there’s a way to get just that information. In Python we can ask for the length (the number of entries) of a list with the len() command. Alright, let’s make a quick change to our script and add the length command. You should have a script now that looks like this:

print(len(op(‘switch1’).inputs))

When you run the script you should see this:

Alright! Now we can start to really make some magic happen. Using .inputs and the len() command we’re able to now see the number of connections to our switch TOP. If you disconnect one of the inputs and run the command again you’ll see the number go down. Add a few more inputs, run the command, and you’ll see the number go up.

How do we use this? Okay, well let’s think back to where we started. We want to use a button to toggle through all of our inputs, and then cycle back to the front of the line. Let’s add a Button component to our Network, and a Count CHOP. Make sure to wire the Button to the top most input on the Count CHOP:

Let’s also make sure that the button is set to momentary:

Looking at our Count CHOP we want to set the Limit Method to “Loop Min/Max.” For the Limit Maximum value we’re going to use the script that we just wrote (only without the print command). We’re also going to subtract 1 from that number. We do this because 0 is still a valid input number for our switch, so while there are five total inputs those are associated with the numbers 0 1 2 3 4. The reference in the Limit Maximum field should look like this:

len(op(‘switch1’).inputs) – 1

Your Count CHOP parameters dialog should look something like this:

And now we have a little bit of black magic happening. If you add more inputs to your switch you’ll see the Limit Maximum number go up automatically, remove some inputs, and you’ll see it go down. Clicking on the button should cycle you through all of the inputs:

Now you know a little more about referencing, dot notation, and how to find more information in the wiki. Happy programming!

Check out the TOE file if you’d like to see what I made: Referencing Part 2

Understanding Referencing | TouchDesigner

Referencing is one of the most powerful tools at the programmer’s disposal in TouchDesigner. Referencing creates a direct link between two or more floats or integers. This allows you to link operators that are outside of their respective families – normally you can only connect CHOPs to CHOPs and TOPs to TOPs, but referencing allows you to create connections between nearly any operators. There are a number of way to create these links with references or expressions. In many of the other posts that I’ve written I often write about using expressions and references, but haven’t taken much time to talk in depth about what this is, how how it all works. Let’s change that.

I started thinking about this when I saw a post on the Derivative forum from a new user struggling with understanding what I’d written in some earlier tutorials. Expressions are something that I continue to learn more about, and open up all sorts of opportunities for faster, more streamlined, and more elegant programming. Let’s start by looking at the typical kinds of referencing that you might do on any project. Specifically, let’s look at how we might connect one family of operators to another. In this example we’ll look at connecting a CHOP to a TOP, and all of the different ways we might do that.

In the image above we actually are referencing the same CHOP in four different ways. We can start this by first talking about how we connect two operators from different families. In this example I’m going to use a noise CHOP and a circle TOP. I want to use the sudo random noise from the noise CHOP to drive the vertical position of my circle in my circle TOP. There are a two major ways that we can make this connection: dragging and dropping the CHOP onto the TOP, or writing an expression that connects the two of them. I often opt for writing the expression – I do this because I think it’s good practice, and has helped me better understand the syntax and structure of using expression in references. We’ll take a look at both of these methods.

Let’s start with the drag and drop method. To use the drag and drop method we need the source operator to be viewer active (there are some exceptions, but it’s a good rule of thumb that your source probably needs to be viewer active to do this). We can make an operator viewer active by clicking on the + symbol in the bottom right corner, or by holding down the alt key (holding alt will make all operators viewer active). You can tell an operator is viewer active because the color coded border disappears, and usually a portion of it is highlighted when you mouse over the operator.

Let’s take a moment to better understand the anatomy of an operator while we have this example handy. On the left upper corner of the operator we have a few different toggle switches – viewer, clone immune, bypass, and lock. Along the very bottom of our operator we have it’s name (you can make changes to this field), any flags associated with the operator family, and the viewer active toggle. Having a solid sense of the anatomy of your operators becomes increasingly important the longer you work with TouchDesigner.

Alright, now that we know how to toggle our viewer active mode on and off, and know a little more about our operators’ anatomy lets look at how to build a reference. Let’s make a noise CHOP in our network as well as a Circle TOP. With the Noise CHOP viewer active, click on the name “chan1” in the viewer, and drag it to the Y parameter of the Circle TOP (I’ve made my circle a little smaller, to make this easier to see):

As you do this you should see a drop down menu appear, let’s select “Export CHOP” from the list. You should now see the Y position (or center 2) changed to a green color. You should also see some text that shows up as well. Here’s a closer look at just the paramater we’ve changed in the circle TOP:

Looking closer we can see that the text reads: noise_active:chan1. Great, but what does that mean?! Well, if we take a closer look at our Noise CHOP we can see that I changed the name of that operator to “noise_active” – we also see that the name of our noise channel is “chan1”. If we were to abstract what we’re seeing in the export language we might write something like this:

source_operator_name:source_channel_name

Exporting is a fine way to connect operators, but it’s not my personal favorite. I say this because exporting creates a locked relationship. Once you’ve done this you can’t change the text in the target operator. Exporting creates a much more permanent relationship between your operators. To remove the export you’ll need to right click on the parameter filed and select “remove export.” Surely there’s a better way to connect operators?!

In fact, there are still three more ways to connect operators. Taking a closer look at the drop down menu that appears when we use the drag and drop method we see the following that there are several Methods:

All of these are ways that we can connect two operators together, and many of them yield the same results, so what gives:

Export CHOP – we’ve already seen this method, and we know that one of its limitations is that it creates a fixed relationship between two operators. This is excellent for creating something more finished for locked in nature.
Text – Text exports the pathway to a particular channel.
Current CHOP Value – this exports the value of the operator in question at the precise moment that you drag and drop. Rather than a continually updating value this is just a single float or integer.
Relative CHOP Reference – the relative reference exports a python expression that points to the operator being referenced. A relative makes for easy cutting and pasting so long as the network hierarchy relationships remain constant between operators.
CHOP Reference (sometimes called Absolute Reference) – the absolute reference also creates a python expression pointing to an operator. The difference here is that it includes the precise pathway to the operator in question making cutting and pasting a bit more frustrating.

For now we’ll take a pass on the “Text” and “Current CHOP Value” options as these have more limited uses. Let’s now take a close look at our Relative and Absolute Reference options.

Relative Referencing

Let’s go ahead and make another circle in our network, and this time let’s create a relative reference between our noise CHOP and our circle TOP.

Taking a closer look at our expression we can see that it reads:

op(“noise1”)[“chan1”]

Okay, what does this mean? Lets start by looking at the syntax of this expression. First we can see that we’re looking for an operator. We know this because our expression starts with op(). Next comes the name of the operator in quotation marks. As an important note, Python doesn’t care if you use double quotes or single quotes so long as they match. This means that “noise1” and ‘noise1’ are both equal and produce the same results; ‘noise1″ or “noise1′ however will not work. Finally we see the name of the channel in question in brackets and in quotes – [“chan1”]. This means that our syntax looks something like operator(“exact_name_of_operator”)[“desired_channel”]. Okay, let’s look at another example to make sure we have a firm understanding of how relative referencing works.

Let’s make a Constant CHOP. Let’s name change the name of the constant to “fruits” and name the first three channels, “apple” “pear” and “lemon”. You should have something that looks like this:

Alright, now lets add a circle TOP to our network. This time, instead of using the drag and drop method we’ll write out the Python expression to create a reference to our constant. We’ll start by referencing our apple channel. This means our expression is going to be:

op(‘fruits’)[‘apple’]

You can write this directly in the expression directly in the target parameter field for the target operator. When you’re done you should have something like this:

If you drag the slider in the constant CHOP to the right, you should now see the circle move up in the viewer. So we’ve successfully connected our circle TOP to the apple channel, why is this any better than just exporting? Well, let’s say that for whatever reason you change your mind while you’re programming and decide that instead you’d prefer for the circle TOP to be connected to the “pear” channel? Written as an expression we can make that change simply by deleting “apple” and replacing it with “pear” or “lemon”. Our expressions then would be:

op(‘fruits’)[‘pear’]
op(‘fruits’)[‘lemon’]

Additionally, if we’ve written a reference as an expression we write some math directly into our reference. We might, for example, only want half of the value coming out of the apple channel. In this case we’d write the expression:

op(‘fruits’)[‘apple’] * 0.5

This would divide ever value in half, changing our scaling from 0 – 1 to 0 – 0.5 instead. We can also use this method to multiply a channel by another channel. For example maybe we want to create a relationship between two different channels from our fruits constant. We might write the expression:

op(‘fruits’)[‘apple’] * op(‘fruits’)[‘lemon’]

You could just as easily do this with a Math CHOP, but you might find that just writing the expression is faster, simpler, or more tidy.

Before we move on, there are two more modifiers that we need to know when writing relative references:

./
../

What on earth are these all about? Well, these are handy directory pointers. At some point you will surely end up wanting to reference an operator that is another part of your network – a control panel, a material, a slider, you name it – if you program in Touch long enough, you’re gonna need these. So what do they mean:

./ – this modifier means the network inside of me
../ – this modifier means in the network above me

If you’re scratching your head, that’s okay. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that we have a Geometry component, and inside of it we have placed a material – a constant that’s red. A relative reference for that material would be “./constant1”. This means, look inside of me for the material called “constant1”.

So how does ../ work then? Imagine that you’d like the alpha of the constant in our geo to be connected to the noise in our parent network. Here we can write a reference that looks like this:

op(‘../noise1′)[‘chan1’]

Here’s what that would look like:

Absolute References

Now that we understand what relative references are, what are absolute References? Unlike relative references, absolute references require the entire network path to an operator. In the case of our noise and circle example, that means that our reference looks like this:

op(“references/noise1”)[“chan1”]

Absolute references require that you know exactly where in your network you’re referencing an operator from, because you have to use the entire network path. That sounds like a pain, so why use them? Well, let’s imagine that you’re building a complex program and you’re trying to be as tidy and organized as possible. You might build a large change of your user interface in a single location. This means that all of the sliders, buttons, and menus that are being called all live in the same container. In this case, using an absolute reference makes good programming sense. Relative references will leave you constantly trying to figure out how many ../ to use when referencing your user interface. Absolute calls don’t require this, as they point to a very specific place in the network. You can even simplify this by making sure that all of your buttons and sliders are joined with a merge CHOP.

To get a better sense of how this works, download the example .toe file and look at the last example that’s driven by sliders that control the level TOP. There’s lots more to learn about expressions, but practicing your references will help you begin to understand the syntax and logic of how they work.

Download this example toe to learn and explore some more – referencing toe

Matthew Ragan

Media Maker and Interactive System Designer