Hello!!! Week three here in Saudi working for Bright on the Esports World Cup and we’re settled into a routine with some time to be doing R&D for future projects. This week I’ve been doing a bit more discovering with Touchdesigner trying to figure out how to trigger an animation event. After few hours searching experimenting I found the animation operator which is fantastic tool allowing you to keyframe values which can be fed into assets to keyframe movement. Bellow is my simple patch which can be packaged up into a container and duplicated and used multiple times with different keyframes animations within a single project .
The heart of it is the animation COMP which doesn’t look like much until you click the edit button in the properties window and low and behold a window appears that allows you to add keyframes / edit them and overlay them on-top of each other for useful visual programming.
Adding channels is simple and can be tailored for each project, key framing is a little bit clunky to start with but there is a useful help window if you right click in the keyframe editor. After 10 and of figuring how to use the tool, key framing becomes quite intuitive and you can fine tune each key with a time and value above the timeline. Below is a simple animation I made key framing the rotation plus the x/y scale over 250 frames.
By default the animation op is locked to the project timeline and I wanted to be able to trigger and retriever the animation on cue. My solution to this was to use the counter op and set it to Increase Count in the While Off field. This will continually count up on each tick unless you set the limit to Clamp Min/Max. I set the Max to the length of my animation and I then used a keyboard input to trigger the reset, In addition I added a reset pinpoint value to be able to trigger further into the timeline easily. Below outlines the basic process and its a nice easy network to setup.
Historically I’ve used vvvv to program systems but since last year Ive been transitioning my knowledge over to Touchdesigner re-learning how to do things which I knew like the back of my hand in vvvv. Its important to keep learning new stuff, even of you don’t ever use it in the future its nice to play. That the end of this little post and to finish it off here’s a tenuous face int my banana at work.
