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.

There was also an invention of 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.