[ Greg Hermanovic demonstrates TouchDesigner 077 with Markus Heckmann ]
Greg Hermanovic of Prisms and Houdini fame was in Berlin for performances with Raster-Noton artists at Club Transmediale. Friend fALk Gärtner had been tipped off that Greg would be around and invited him to talk at the weekly Visual Berlin meeting.
One of Greg’s passions is for live visuals, which he founded Derivative Inc. to make software for. The result was the TouchDesigner platform. Based on Houdini, TouchDesigner has been around since 2000. I used it from 2003-2006 before I got rid of my dedicated Windows hardware.
[ The Mixxa interface. Everything is 2 clicks away ]
Greg and Markus Heckmann showed off the newest iteration, TouchDesigner 077. The software has come a long way in the last two years. Greg’s interim project, Mixxa, a “video mixer for drunk VJs” was built with the new generation of TouchDesigner. All of the controls are designed to be only two clicks away.
[ Down the rabbit hole. The recursive TouchDesigner interface. ]
Markus demonstrated the power of the engine running behind the scenes. All of the interface objects are built within TouchDesigner, allowing the controls to be zoomed in recursively to the lowest level. Signal flow paths along with visualization of audio waveforms and visual previews are available at a level unheard of in other live software packages. Of course the system requirements of an NVIDIA graphics card with 512MB of video RAM go a long way toward allowing this magic.
A free for non-commercial use version of TouchDesigner, the “Free Thinking Environment” is available for Windows XP and Vista. Greg announced that a Mac port of TouchDesigner had begun, based on the success of the Houdini port last year. Components built with TouchDesigner can be exchanged with other users in the native .tox format.
