Transcript for: Art Display Techniques Using TouchDesigner
[Instructor] The final thing we're going to look at today, is how to take some of the things we've been building and showing you how to output them in a window, onto a screen or projector or an LED wall. It's the same process for all of these different kinds of displays. So the first thing I'm going to do very quickly is just load in a movie. Let me grab one of these nature ones. I'll put some text over it, just that we know this is art, just in case you were wondering. And then with my final kind of, this is art piece. I want to display this onto my screen. So there's one very useful operator that we're going to use for that. And it's called the Window COMP and its only job in life is to take textures and basically create windows that we're going to use for display purposes. So the first thing we're going to do, is select our Window COMP here for the window operator perimeter at the top. We're going to want to tell it what we want to display in the window. So in this case I can drag and drop my null1 and you'll see inside of the window, I now have a preview of what it's going to be drawing. Now you'll also see that there are a lot of parameters for the Window COMP. This is really nice for pro-users because we have a lot of ways to tweak how the window works. For new users, it can be a little bit intimidating, but I'll tell you, you don't need to touch most of them in most cases. The ones you need to know, I'll show you. First one I think is most important is, open as a separate window. This button, if you click it, this will open the window in whatever setting shape it is. And it won't close your network editor. And we'll talk about perform mode in a second but this is like if you want it to open the window while still working, you would click open as a separate window. Now you can see here, I have this window which is my texture in the background and it functions like any application. I can scale it and make it bigger, or smaller, all those good things that we have with applications that you might develop. Now, in this case, I'm going to close it because what I find, is in most cases you don't want things like header bars, you just want to take this and full screen it onto whatever screen or projector you're using. So I'm going to go ahead and close this. First thing I'm going to do which is something I always do is I go to borders, turn this toggle off. Now, if I hit that open in a separate window button again, I will have the same thing, but without a header bar. Now you might be wondering, oh, how do I get rid of this now, that I can't drag it around and there's no header bar? One of the big hotkeys and shortcuts you need to know when working with TouchDesigner, is if you ever opened a window, you can just click on it and hit Escape on your keyboard and it'll close it. So that's how you get rid of any of those. That's how we're going to get out of perform mode later. I'll come back to that and we'll talk about it. So, borders is a key one that you'll probably want to know even as a new user. The other one is this Monitors because usually what you'll want to do is, create your output and then go to a monitor and be like, this is the one that it's going on. And there's a lot of nitty gritty technical stuff behind how we set up windows, both the operating system and the actual Window COMPs. But those are more advanced techniques, and if you're interested in that, we have a training on creating flawless installations and how to kind of set up the Window COMPs and everything perfectly. But in this case, what most new users will want to do, is you'll probably, open a separate window and drag this monitor index around until you find the right screen. And in this case, what you'll see is, I only have one screen. So once I leave index zero, I basically lose the content until I close the screen and open it on monitor zero again, but for yours you may find that depending on whether using Windows or Mac, how the screens are arranged inside of kind of the OSs, like the operating system level of display settings, you might be able to figure out what index that screen is without having to scrub around. Now we have that. Now what you're seeing is when we opened this window, it's actually not filling my screen. Now, the reason that is, and I'll hit escape to close my window, is because my texture is only 1920, sorry, 1280 by 720, while my display is 1920 by 1080. So we've got some discrepancy here and there's a bunch of different ways we can deal with that. One of them is that, we can either resize our texture. So it is actually the full size of my screen or we can use some of the handy features of the Window COMP which allow us to fill and resize our texture. So what we could do here, is we can come down to the opening size. And right now you can see it's set automatic from COMP/TOP. And what that means is the window is just going to take whatever native resolution our texture is at. And that's the side that's going to use when opening this new window. What I can also do, is set it to something like fill. And then when I hit this open in separate window, you'll see what it does now. Is it's actually fully filled my screen edge to edge over the task bar, all that good window stuff is out of the way. And now we have our art piece fully full screened on this display. Now, remember if you get stuck here again, you just have to click on that window and hit Escape to get out. And with that, that's kind of really the nuts and bolts of a beginner's usages of the Window COMP. You really just want to figure out what monitor you want to go to, with this monitor. You want to figure out whether you want to have the Window COMP deal with the scaling or leave it automatic, and then, just make sure your textures are at the right size and turning on and off borders. That's really kind of the most of it. The one final thing is right now, we've been hitting open as a separate window. And what this does behind the scenes is, this does in fact open the window. It does cover our screen, but TouchDesigner is actually still running in the background. So if I was to like, Alt + Tab, which I can't really do easily right now but if I was to Alt + Tab, what we would see is that TouchDesigner is still running. The network editor is still working. You can still work in here and touch stuff and fill with stuff. So this is the sub optimized way of creating the output because even all of just TouchDesigner's beautiful graphics inside of the window, take some of your systems resources away. So to deal with this TouchDesigner has something called perform mode and perform mode is different from this open as a separate window, because like I said, if we turn off the fill, we can actually see it because if I open this small window, we see we have our window here but I still have TouchDesigner in the background. Now, if I open as perform mode, actually what'll happen is, it'll actually get rid of my network editor completely. It just shuts it down, puts it behind the scenes and gives full processing power to a window that's creating our content. And in this case, this will give you much better performance in 99.999% of cases. So maybe if you're using the open as a separate window while you're working as okay, but when you go to that time for show, you really want to switch it over to perform mode. So with that said, right now I have to close this window to get back to my network editor. So I'm going to click on it, click Escape. And what you can see was there was a little flicker as the network editor was re-enabled and was opened up again. So with perform window, open as a separate window, borders, how to choose your monitor and the opening size, you should have most of your use cases covered. In many cases, you may also want to turn on, the always on top, which basically just means that other applications can't all of a sudden be, all tabbed or selected somehow and cover up your performance window. So your mileage may vary on which ones of those you need because it's very specific on kind of how your setup is, but for most cases, that should be enough to get you up and running. So with that, you should have a decent understanding and way to experiment with all the operator families, decent understanding of TouchDesigner, just in general, the application and the workflow as well as how to take some of these experiments you've been making and plugging them into some kind of output whether it's a display, a projector, an LED wall. And if there's more things that you want to really deep dive on, strongly suggest you look at our other video trainings.