Weekly Recap 6

Jason
September 20, 2022
recaps

My first Weekly Recap back from COVID. I was supposed to be on vacation, but being sick, I had to miss. Instead I made up a couple of R&D days I missed for the next phase of the projection gig I’ve been working on. All Touchdesigner this week, hopefully more Houdini soon.

In Touchdesigner I’m seeing how important it is to find a balance of quick ideation and being really smart with resources. I need to trigger the same video clip a ton of times, in quick succession, but the video needs to play out, not get cut short with each new trigger.

I figured out I can use the Count CHOP to sort of generate unique triggers for multiple presses on the same button. That’s got me half way there.

To get video to play with each trigger, and not get cut off or restart, I could bring in multiple copies of the video… easy, but inefficient. I’ll need 12 videos as is, and likely 6 instances of each. I need a better way. The Cache and Cache Select TOP work great for this.

With the Cache TOP I cache the single video to GPU memory, then with the Cache Select TOP I can scrub through the cached images via my triggers. Big bonus, for each Select, there is zero gpu memory usage and very little compute overhead. Big win.

Last week I needed to optimize render outs for multiple cameras (projectors), and also generate screen space mattes. In the past I’ve just dropped multiple Render TOPs for each camera or matte I’d need. As usual there are better ways. The Render Select TOP and Render Pass TOP.

On your Render TOPs, it’s not obvious but you can feed in multiple cameras. Then on the Render Select TOP just choose which you want to render. You can also limit lights or geo this way.

For mattes you can also use the Render Pass TOP. It’s very similar, has a few different options, and multiple Render Pass TOPs can be chained together.