Semester B: Week 23 Student: Tai Ser Yeet (22064351) Programme: BA (Hons)(SW) Digital Media Design
WEEK 23
Learning Touch Designer
Going through the YouTube tutorials is taking me longer than expected. Initially, I thought I could complete all the videos from the course in one week, but other priorities got in the way, and I was unable to complete them all. Currently, I am on SOP operators and have only MATs, DATs and COMPs to go before I can begin on an actual project.
Following the SOP tutorial
I learned that particle SOPs need to be based on some form of geometry to take shape. To remove the appearance of a shape, it is recommended to add a "sort SOP" and select a random pattern, allowing it to disperse unpredictably. Not only that, since SOPs take up a lot of RAM, the viewer of each operator should ideally be switched off to maintain the frame rate.
Experimenting with Particles SOP
13/3/26
Although I am a little behind, I have been gradually ticking off tasks from the beginner course. I wanted to expedite the learning, so I figured that going straight into creating the floofy hair animation was worth a try but boy, was I wrong.
Project Timeline
This was the tutorial that I followed, or at least tried to.
Halfway through the video, I became so lost. I didn't understand the logic and was just blindly following whatever the creator was doing. Moreover, I was not learning anything useful in terms of how and why the operator chains were used for this particular instance. Because I did not have a decent understanding towards SOPs, COMPs, and especially instancing, I could not navigate my way through this. Not wasting any more time, I abandoned this endeavour and went back to finishing the video about MATs.
Workspace on Floofy Hair
15/3/26
Today I went through a tutorial about MATs.
The creator showed us how he made thin lines and animated them so the sphere rotates on the y-axis.
I added a CHOP to the network by dragging and dropping the data from the Noise TOP into the 'Displace Scale' field. This creates movement on the sphere that looks almost like a beating heart. Right now, the noise is driving the animation, but I’m wondering if I can control that movement using motion detected by the Kinect sensor instead.
CHOP Reference to Displace Scale
Adjusting the parameters of the LFO CHOP directly changes the behaviour of the animation. For instance, increasing the amplitude expands the range of the signal, which causes the sphere to contract completely inward (reaching negative values) before expanding back outward. For context, a high amplitude will push those values into the negatives, causing the sphere to "turn inside out" or contract fully before popping back out.
