Welcome to the cave

A post on r/Touchdesigner caught my eye one day: a Germany-based videography team was organizing a local livestream/house-party and was looking for visual artists.

I was completely sold as soon as I saw the space.

The crew had a projector for visuals, but for the previous livestream at this location they only projected onto the front of the mixing table.

I lobbied hard and fast to project
onto the entire room instead.

I think they liked it.

All that was left was to cook. I made a custom Visuals Controller within Touchdesigner, and learned about .tox instantiation and many other workflows for dynamic programming and data processing within TD.

I also created an interesting take on control knobs that I haven't seen anywhere else, a Delayed Knob. It includes a numeric field to set an amount in seconds that the Knob would interpolate a value change over.

The reasoning behind this was that I was controlling the visuals on the local Macbook through Teamviewer. Attempting to do manual control live over that connection would have put me at the mercy of the internet. Not a good position.

These knobs ensured transitions were smooth when my connection was not.

The program as a whole ended up being just barely too beefy for the feeble Macbook the team had dedicated to me. I had to do a lot of optimization within my visuals and last-minute optimizations to the application itself.

The end result wasn't perfect, but it was an improvement upon the quality of the previous stream, so I was happy with that.

Oh, and the videography was class.