factorysettings

Particle Dancer: Particle spawning system in Touchdesigner

Added 2023-07-18 15:40:46 +0000 UTC

Dearest Friends, I've been playing with this for a while now. The goal was to make a lightweight patch, easy to follow, runs on older systems and with not too many overwhelming tweaking options. I must say that getting the footage from this particular dancer really helped polishing the patch a bit more. Thanks to Dayne Florence a lot!

This patch started at a point where I couldn't cope with these utterly complex patches anymore. For instance the particleGPU on the palette, with al due respect to the programmer of this .TOX, it's not very beginner friendly. Personally, I like to know how stuff works, this makes optimizing way easier and I can adjust the file to my own taste. So after looking at different provided particle systems from the community I decided to build one from scratch.

Don't get me wrong, I have much respect for developers building these patches and provide them freely to the community. But I like to build stuff from scratch and explain how things work, and if things become to complex, it wouldn't result into a nice and easy to follow tutorial anyway, so that's why this patch.

I'll record a tutorial about this patch so you can build it your own, get a more thorough understanding of these systems. But for now, just play with this one!

I like to keep patches clean, lightweight, and with not too many options, these will make it more complex again. The nuances could be achieved by yourself after getting a more indepth knowledge about how this works. So hopefully after the tutorial you'll be able to add your own options!

The 'sensitivity' controls how the optical flow shader picks up movement, the higher, the less sensitive. The 'particle life' controls how long the particles will be visible after spawning. There is some randomness build in to make it more organic, but this main 'life' defines the overall life. 'Gravity', just like it says, controls gravity, the higher, the more downward attraction.

Have fun and stay tuned for the tutorial!