Noise Displacement in TouchDesigner

This beginner level TouchDesigner tutorial covers using the Noise TOP to generate vertex displacement effects within the Phong MAT. It also touches on how to create a render network from scratch, recoloring with the Lookup TOP, and adding post-render shading with the SSAO TOP.
In the article linked to below I discuss these topics in more depth. If you have questions, comments, suggestions or corrections please leave them below, and thanks for watching and reading!
www.simonaa.media/tutorials/n...
Topic Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:31 Setting up the render network
06:12 Normal, color and height maps with noise
13:12 Coloring with the Lookup TOP
15:09 Adding motion to noise
16:33 Exploring noise parameters
17:50 Noise coordinate map input
22:55 Adding detail with the normal map
25:30 Changing camera angles
26:50 Changing geometry input
28:50 Screen Space Ambient Occlusion TOP

[@ThisDaniel]

Your tutorials are the best online Ive come across. Please keep making them!!

[@mascarimedia]

Great tutorial - the best I've seen on TD yet.

[@chrispetersen3613]

Can't wait for your next tutorial! Each one on your is very high quality and I appreciate the time in effort you put into making them. You helped me fall in love with touch!

[@polyhop]

Thank you! That's great to hear that it's helped spark your interest :) I do plan on creating more once work settles down. Hopefully soon!

[@suehoung2091]

Thx for sharing all this amazing skills in the video!

[@dreamaera]

Learned a bunch, great tutorials :)

[@weeeBloom]

thanks, awesome tutorial!

[@narissawall9740]

You're an extremely good teacher, thank you so much for putting this stuff out for free! I'm new to more generative art and it can get super overwhelming sometimes, your work is very much appreciated :)

[@pheelia]

awesome, thank you so much

[@perrxfrescx9231]

bro thankz for the video and insights. u rock, not only explain how to do it, u help to understand it. love from Perú. #OnlyFreeCulture

[@jaminkidd6285]

Thanks!

[@CrazyRadiofilm]

Thanks a lot for sharing your great skills. I learn a lot from this video.
but my FPS is already dropped a lot when I am increasing rows and columns of Grid haha

[@zorianakozak1320]

thank you

[@edwardnixon1782]

Thanks very much! Very clear, logical, and good looking. Doing this network on a MacBook Pro having deleted the SSAO, I'm still chugging at 12 fps. This is not a horrible situation because I would tend to want to export this rather than run in real-time. However, there's the question of adding some audio... You mention early on that coding within the Geo can be a thing. My recollection is that everything that runs inside the Geo is on the GPU. Have I got that more or less right? In any event, to what extent could some or all of this be moved off the CPU onto the GPU? If that's not feasible, could you point me to resources or tutorials that take a different route to a similar effect? Thanks again; these tutorials are excellent and I can consume as many as you have time and energy to produce. Best in sequestration.

[@polyhop]

Hey Edward, one thing you could do is to make sure your viewports are not active. Especially the SOPs, since displaying dense geometry in a SOP viewer takes up significant CPU resources. I usually see performance drop if I have one open that has one million+ points (1000x1000 rows and columns will do that.) As far as running things on the GPU, the rule of thumb is that TOPs primarily use the GPU, while CHOPs, SOPs and DATs hit the CPU. Doing operations inside the Geo COMP wont change anything unfortunately, only your selection of operators will affect this. Hopefully this helps!

[@edwardnixon1782]

@@polyhop Thank you for the info. Running it today was not horrible and, as I mentioned, it's not a real-time application anyway -- vimeo.com/421108603. Cheers and thanks again!

[@SG-hh1hz]

Havent quite figured out Resolutions in TouchDesigner yet: Is there any way to set a (kind of) Global Resolution to avoid doing every TOP resolution by hand ? i Come from VVVV where you can just store some values somewhere and plug them to any with/height input.

[@polyhop]

Yes! There many different ways to go about this, though I often use python storage myself. Store your resolution values in the topmost project container or COMP ( something like parent().store('resX',1920) parent().store('resY',1080) , put it in a text DAT on separate lines, right click, choose run). Then anytime you want that resolution you can type me.fetch('resX') , me.fetch('resY') as python expressions. Then, you can always change the storage to update the rest of the project.
Another way would be to use the project container's own resolution to drive the rest. If you add a global OP shortcut (let's say "project") you can reference it's parameters without worrying about hierarchy like: op.project.par.w op.project.par.h respectively. That said, then you can't have a separate render resolution to what might be a UI container, so I usually go for the first approach.
Hope this gives you some ideas on how to organize resolution!

[@zipporahdelong324]

Is it possible to make this audio-reactive?

[@Stray_side]

Please tell me, it’s possible for me to score sound to this?!

[@NikhilShrestha]

Hey! I don't have an option with any of the displace parameters in the Phong menu. It shows the Diffuse Map option right after the Parallax Occlusion option. Any way to fix this?

[@polyhop]

1. Make sure you are have an up to date version of TD installed (I think it was introduced in 099.) 2. It will only be available if you have referenced a TOP in the "Normal Map (Bump") parameter. Dragging a TOP there will let you enable the height map.

[@user-gs3fe2yn7c]

thanks!! when are you planning to post the next video?

[@polyhop]

I have 2 more released on Vimeo ( vimeo.com/sealex ) - I need to get around to also putting them on TH-cam but got busy and haven't had the chance. I do plan on creating new content soon as well when some of my current projects wrap.

[@oihanavillanuevasanchez5570]

looks awesome!
I try it with 2000 Rows and Columns but still seen like super pixelate :(
The render resolution is 1080 too .. why could be that?

[@polyhop]

I would make sure the resolution of the TOPs used for the displacement, bump and color maps is at least 1000 px as well. If that's not it I would need more information to diagnose (it's hard without seeing the network in question.)

[@Honrar01]

I don't have the option '' activate the height map '' in Phong, where can I activate this option?

[@polyhop]

1. Make sure you are have an up to date version of TD installed (I think it was introduced in 099.) 2. It will only be available if you have referenced a TOP in the "Normal Map (Bump") parameter. Dragging a TOP there will let you enable the height map.

[@lucaslorenzo3328]

Hi Simon , when I add the map null to Normal map (bump) in the render appear a Warning message "a mat is map to normal mapping but the sop being used with it does not have a tangent attribute" and the preview goes totally black. Do you know what's happening ? I'm following the steps as you show in the video. Thanks!

[@MCjirok]

I got the same issue. Try to add 'attribute create' with compute tangents turned on between grid and geo. It worked for me.
upd. it will be later on the video 11:50

[@js4741]

@@MCjirok thank you, this worked for me too!

[@user-dx7jv4xs7j]

have you fixed that? I met same problem

[@leonidkrykhtin]

Exactly same issue here too

[@MrDylanfine]

why did I get a whole dark block when I throw normal maps into the phone1?

[@user-dx7jv4xs7j]

have you fixed that？ I met same problem