Intro to Touchdesigner

Touchdesigner is a programming software popular amongst all kinds of creatives. Within the Creative Technology Lab we aim to support students in developing interactive projects, often combined with physical computing and projection mapping.

Touchdesigner is a node-based software, a type of visual programming language. This means that for the most part we won't be dealing with tradition coding, instead we will be using Operators; These are ready-made "blocks of code", each performing different functions. Linking nodes together allows us to manipulate data to program our network. Just like in western reading, data in Touchdesigner flows left to right. Another way to understand networks is comparing them to layers in Photoshop: every new node added to your network will alter the previous node.

 

       ^{Layers in Photoshop.                                          Nodes linked to create a network in Touchdesigner.}