19/7/25

First blog post! Yay! So this last week has been all about reinforcing solid foundations in Touchdesigner, such as instancing. I worked a lot on instancing things using CHOPs, TOPs or SOPs. I mostly learned these different ways from Bileam Tschepe’s YouTube

I wanted to understand these methods in detail as they can save GPU (orCPU) power instead of using SOPs too much. I also think it’s important to really understand the different ways of doing things, eg instead of using points in SOPs to instance, you can use the resolution (pixels) in TOPs to do the same thing (or numbers in CHOPs)

Basically I spent a lot of time thinking of something, then making it in Touchdesigner. I find this a great way of proving you’re learning, instead of just following along with tutorials. So for example i’ll think ‘I want 12 boxes going across the x and y axis, and they must be coloured from purple to green to yellow from left to right’. Then make myself do it.

A good one I did was to make four circles, one in each corner of the screen, then make each one react to 4 different tracks in Ableton Live. So a kick drum controlled the size of the top left circle, the snare controlled the size of the top right circle, etc etc….

I also did a lot of work using the particle SOP this week. I found that instead of having hundreds or thousands of particles, you can achieve some really interesting visuals with just a few particles. If you take some of the parameters right down, you can achieve a real glitch fest!

As always, feedback loops were in most of my pieces, utilising the feedback, composite, mirror, tile and displace TOPs. I find just the slightest feedback trails on things to be extremely satisfying, they always seem to add an ‘icing on the cake’ moment for me. As I learned from Bileam, the world is your oyster as to what you put in the feedback loop. So far i’ve added tiles, mirrors, edges and a displace TOP.

The displace TOP is a fantastic tool. I often put one in the end of my chain and displace against my work. Again, you can really get some amazing results using this, from subtle droplets to all out chaos and everything in between.

Finally, I must note the edge TOP. This has really created some interesting visuals that when coupled with feedback loops really come alive.

Below are some images and videos of work I did this week…