PointTransform

A Generative(not gen-ai) Art UI w/ glitch-bending demos. Most projects in TouchDesigner involve only a single scene b/c of difficulty managing state. I propose and demo of a way to manage state

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Inspiration

This project was inspired by many of those in the TouchDesigner community. Most notably, "ThePoetEngineer" on Instagram and credit to "supermarket salad" on Youtube for their wonderful tutorials I followed. In addition, the decision to make an UI demonstrating State management, and devising a way to control state was inspired by my frustrations at getting working scene transitions that were than a simple fade-in/fade-out

What it does

PointTransform is a gesture-controlled UI, with glitch-bending demos, created using TouchDesigner. Having ran into significant trouble managing State in TouchDesigner and unable to create the seamless particle transitions I envisioned, I set out to create an way to store state simply without having to resort to jank/unwieldy methods. In addition, handling State this way can abstract the python, allowing users less experienced in programing to still manage state. In addition, I plan to open-source my code and components so that others are able to use them in their work - I'd love to see more projects with transitions and more complex state and I believe my method allows inexperienced users to be able to interact with state bringing a whole new plethora of visualizations into the realm of possibility.

It contains a couple main Scenes. By managing the states and transitions in-between I am able to have an interactive main menu, in addition to having different mini-projects inside the main project that are fully functional. Demo1, consists of a black-hole/stellar miasma particle effect that is controllable by pinching the fingers. The x and y distances between the thumb and index finger work together to apply a PointTransform(hence, the name) to the pixels. A similar effect with PointTransform operators is leveraged for the main menu.

For the glitch effect, I incorporated some pre-processed chromatic aberration along with liberal use of noise, blur, displace, and distort operators to create a parametric glitch effect. In addition, custom text was incorporated to complete the glitch effect.

How I built it

caffeine, an all nighter, and an inordinate amount of rage at the existing ways of managing state.

What's next for PointTransform

I plan to clean up the code, to provide a clean and readable example of how to create a Stateful UI and upload the example, and components to the TouchDesigner component library as a free open-source example!

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