Hou2Touch

Understanding proceduralism is a key to generative modeling and animation and while it’s opening abstract thinking abilities, it opens you the way to creating a generative art.

In my course I chose a family of 2 the most old and powerful software systems sharing a lot of ideas and tools being produced by the same prophet mind.

The history of that family was started in 1987 by producing SideFX PRISMS turning in 1995 to Houdini - most powerful procedural software till now anticipated CGI development in 15 years. At the end of the 90`s Greg Hermanovic - one of the Ideologists of Houdini production realized that the future is “The Realtime on GPU” which resulted in deriving TouchDesigner from Houdini in 2001. It became the procedural realtime multi-purpose tool produced by Derivative Inc.

Since that time Houdini and TouchDesigner were developing standalone in different ways while still employing a lot of common concepts and techniques together, providing to the artist the great variety of tools for creating both realtime and non-realtime graphics and art.

Starting to work in 3D two years after Houdini’s birth I was using 3D Studio DOS, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max ( since a 1st version), changing to Softimage, turning then to Maya power user till I met Houdini in 2002. Working in film production at the same moment I've started to make workshops and courses since 2001.

Since 2005 I had exclusively worked in Houdini adding TouchDesigner in 2012. Because of my Houdini experience, my TouchDesigner crash start took me only 2 hours.

Actually learning TouchDesigner you already learning Houdini and the opposite.

This idea is a starting point of this course oriented for the completely new to mid-experienced artists. My teaching style was developed during 19 years of educational practice and is based on the academic approach explaining not the “menu options” but the ideology and paradigm of the software, teaching you how to think by nodes and corresponding grammar, but still providing enough of the practical examples and cases.

I plan to explain in parallel similarities and differences between both programs showing the ways to extend the limited modeling possibilities of TD by amazing SOPs (surface operators) and DOPs (dynamics operators) contexts of Houdini and how to increase the working process by realtime TOP (rendering and compositing) and adding interfacing to data sources not supported by Houdini using the CHOP context of TouchDesigner, sharing data using common geometry and animation formats, as well as scene description formats and OpenEXR textures.

1. A Practical example of procedural approach and the difference to the traditional way

2. What visual programming is and why it's still simple for non-programmers.

3. Basic Glossary:

• Node
• Node Based Workflow
• Data Types
• Comparison to other node based environments.

4. User Interface and Workflow:

• TouchDesigner compared to Houdini
• Data structure & Contexts
• Node Interface
• Parameters
• Direct and indirect data connection
• Managers in Houdini

5. Setup of the Basic 3D scene and Rendering in Houdini

6. Animating camera using paths

7. Export of scene using FBX to TouchDesigner

8. Rendering workflow in TouchDesigner. Rendering the Imported Scene in TouchDesigner

9. Output to the beamer/second screen. Designing the layout

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