Dean Cheesman

Blob Tracker Plus v2.4 update - Zoom Effects

I'm doing more work than normal prepping for my next tutorial, but didn't want to leave ya'll empty handed. I've been wanting to add this zoom effect to my blob tracker tool and finally have taken the time to do it. It makes for some really fun surveillance style tracking videos.

The UI is very simple. I've added a "Zoom Fill" toggle and a "Zoom Amount". You'll want to play with the zoom amount depending on the sizes of your blobs.

I'm looking forward to see what you make with this!

Things that are on my todo list for this tool:

• Instanced Images on blobs

• Audio Triggers

• Background Fills for Text Labels

• Maybe a POPs optimized version?

Let me know what else you'd like to see.

Make Complex Video Loops in TouchDesigner

In this walkthrough I make a complex video loop using particles.

The trick is simple. I move through noise space on a perfect circle using sine and cosine. Start point equals end points, so the loop is perfect.

The project file for this tutorial is available to all my paid members.

Smooth Point Cloud Sprinkles with UV Unwrapping - Project Files

Here are the project files for paid members on my Smooth Point Cloud Sprinkles with UV Unwrapping tutorial.

Smooth Point Cloud Sprinkles with UV Unwrapping - TouchDesigner Tutorial

In this tutorial, I show how I get evenly distributed points across geometry surfaces.

The trick: combining world position texturing with UV unwrapping. I also cover how to create satisfying transitions between different point clouds using the Matte TOP.

Genoma’s Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqTpxNIuNdA&t=1782s

Rodin text-to-3D Models: https://hyper3d.ai/?gad_campaignid=21669797681

As a freelancer, I’m always up for new projects. If you want to collaborate shoot me a DM.

Video Depth Anything Effects - Project Files

Watch the Tutorial:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/131626044

Give any video a 3D effect with TouchDesigner and Video Depth Anything. In this tutorial, I show you how to get depth data from your video content and turn it into impressive point clouds and scan lines using TouchDesigner. I show you multiple methods, including a comparison to how it can be done with POPs.

Video Depth Anything’s Hugging Face Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/depth-anything/Video-Depth-Anything

I freelance! If you're interested in working together, let's chat. https://deancheesman.com/contact

Video Depth Anything Effects - TouchDesigner Tutorial

Give any video a 3D effect with TouchDesigner and Video Depth Anything. In this tutorial, I show you how to get depth data from your video content and turn it into impressive point clouds and scan lines using TouchDesigner. I show you multiple methods, including a comparison to how it can be done with POPs.

Project Files: https://www.patreon.com/posts/131625571/

Video Depth Anything’s Hugging Face Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/depth-anything/Video-Depth-Anything

I freelance! If you're interested in working together, let's chat. https://deancheesman.com/contact

Video: Updates in Blob Tracker Plus v2.3

Made a video showing the new features in Blob Tracker Plus v2.3

Really excited about these new Additions to the Blob Tracker Plus tool. Focusing on making it easier to both just drop in a video and play with parameters to get your desired output.

• Tracker Shapes: Square, circle, triangle, and crosshair

• Fill Options including an invert fill

• Text alignment tools: horizontal, vertical, and offset options

• Easily add custom text with a table

• Tracers: Connect your blobs with straight or curved lines

Patrons can download the tool here.

Blob Tracker Plus update v2.3

New shapes, inverted fill, text alignment, custom text, and tracers!

Really excited about these new Additions to the Blob Tracker Plus tool. Focusing on making it easier to both just drop in a video and play with parameters to get your desired output.

• Tracker Shapes: Square, circle, triangle, and crosshair

• Fill Options including an invert fill

• Text alignment tools: horizontal, vertical, and offset options

• Easily add custom text with a table

• Tracers: Connect your blobs with straight or curved lines

Severance-Inspired ASCII Text Effect

This tutorial explains how to make a basic ASCII text effect and then adds movement and interactivity with noise and optical flow feedback. Some techniques covered in this video include texture instancing, replicators, and UV math.

As a freelancer, I’m always looking for new collaborations. If you’re interested in working together, let’s chat!

Blob Tracker Plus Tutorial

I’ve created a new tool exclusively for my Patreon supporters, bringing all those cool Blob Tracking effects to every version of TouchDesigner.

Features:
• Unlimited Blobs: No restrictions on the number of blobs you can track.
• Custom Thresholding Tools: Fine-tune the blob detection to suit your needs.
• Easy Resolution Selection: Quickly adjust the resolution for your projects.
• Simple ID Annotation: Effortlessly label and track individual blobs.
• Ample Data Outputs: Build your own custom effects with rich data streams.

As a freelancer, I’m always looking for new collaborations. If you’re interested in working together, let’s chat! 📩 Contact me: deancheesman.com/contact

Blob Tracker Plus 2.2 Update

Ok. I just recorded a tutorial for this that I'm going to work on editing and getting out soon, but I thought I'd give ya'll an early look at this updated blob tracker.

Changes:

• Better thresholding including an invert function

• More granular control on min/max blob size

• Adding Morphological Operations to erode and dilate blobs after contours have been found

Its been great seeing all the amazing things you've been making with this. Keep tagging me in posts and I'll reshare them for everyone to see!

Blob Tracker Plus 2.1

Thanks for your feedback!

Changes:

• Fixed Bug where certain parameters would error when not an odd number.

• Parameter to choose blob vs motion tracking

Thanks for trying it out! Let me know if there are any other features you'd love to see in this tool!

Blob Tracker Plus v2

I’m releasing the Blob Tracker Tool v2 a little early for my Patrons to get your feedback before a wider release. This tool is designed to enhance blob tracking in TouchDesigner with added features and flexibility, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Key Features:

• Advanced Blob Tracking: Tracks and matches blobs with adjustable parameters for better control.

• Text Overlay: Easily add annotations to your blobs directly in the tool.

• Clean Output: Provides a polished line TOP output for integration into your projects.

• Customizable Settings: Parameters like blur size, thresholding, and area filtering give you control to adapt it to your needs.

Why I’m Sharing It Early:

Your feedback is incredibly valuable. I want to make this tool as useful as possible, so please let me know:

• What’s working well?

• What’s missing that you’d like to see?

• Any bugs or quirks you run into?

The goal is to make this tool better with your input, so don’t hold back.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Download it now and give it a try. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

Text Particle Transitions

Add this effect to your lyric video or use it to fancy up your captions on your next social post.

This method isn’t limited to text through. You could replace the text SOPs with all sorts of shapes, geometry, etc to transition between.

As a freelancer, I'm always excited to collaborate on new projects. If you're interested in working together, let's chat!

Create Time Machine Warp Effects

You can make any video look like it is dancing to your audio track with this fun technique of combining beat detection and the Time Machine TOP. As a bonus, I added a simple motion-driven bloom/flash effect.

As a freelancer, I'm always excited to collaborate on new projects. If you're interested in working together, let's chat! https://deancheesman.com/contact

Blob Tracking and Tracers Part 2

I’m expanding on my first video of blob tracking and tracing. This time, it includes some new things, like how to zoom inside the blob tracking rectangles, splicing out a subsection of blobs for tracing, and effects.

You can download the video I used from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/video/light-city-road-traffic-4062991/ 

As a freelancer, I'm always excited to collaborate on new projects. If you're interested in working together, let's chat! https://deancheesman.com/contact

Interactive Installation Particles

This tutorial combines optical flow feedback with particle systems. This technique is great for making interactive installations with cameras or dynamic rendered video content. This effect is done primarily in TOPs with feedback loops for both the position and velocity.

You can download the masked dancer video I used from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/video/fire-performance-at-night-14524402/

Kinect Point Cloud Particles

In this TouchDesigner tutorial I’ll show you how to take the particle cloud input from a Kinect V2, filter out the points you don’t want, and add color and movement effects. These techniques can be combined with many of the other particle effects we’ve covered in these tutorials

Geo Text Particles

In this tutorial you’ll learn how you can move text around as if it were a particle, but still maintaining all the font metrics, kerning, etc that you want from text rendering. The Geo Text comp is our key tool in this and we’ll learn how to use some of its special functions to make generative and interactive effects with text.

Other topics covered in this tutorial:

• Operator Snippets

• UV Remapping

• Dat Execute and Parameter Execute

The .toe file below is the project file from the tutorial and the .tox file is your drag and drop plugin.

Audio Reactive Voxel Ripples

In this tutorial, we combine a few different techniques for some generative visual goodness—audio reactivity, optical flow feedback effects, and instancing with tops. 

To be completely honest I wasn't super stoked with where it landed at the end of the video so I did a bunch more tweaking that you can see in the attached project file.

Force Field Particle Effect

This effect was a happy accident that came out of my experiementing with making a stipple effect using instanced force fields in TouchDesigner. I think there's a lot more that can be done with this technique so I thought I'd share!

Other things you might learn in this tutorial:  

• Particle Instancing

• Force Field Textures

• Smooth Normalizing Textures

As a freelancer, I'm always excited to collaborate on new projects. If you're interested in working together, let's chat!

Flocking Effect in TouchDesigner

I’ve tried doing this in TouchDesigner for years and have finally figured it out. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a particle effect that combines all three forces a flocking algorithm requires: attract, repel, and follow.

Other things you might learn in this tutorial:  

• Optical flow feedback for liquid effects  

• Rotate To function for 2D particles

• Advanced rendering techniques

Audio Reactive Kaleidoscope Visuals with TouchDesigner

Dive into this TouchDesigner tutorial creating generative audio-reactive kaleidoscope visuals. Perfect for all skill levels, we'll break down complex concepts into simple steps.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a one-of-a-kind, attention-grabbing visual setup that reacts to audio in real-time. More importantly, you’ll acquire practical insights that can be directly applied to a myriad of other projects, empowering you with a wealth of knowledge.

Topics Covered in this Video:  

• Basic beat detection  

• Envelope Chop  

• Kaleidoscope Effect  

• Glitch/Datamosh effects with Time Machine TOP

GLSL Particle Simulations

Whether you’re a programmer or not, GLSL can initially seem intimidating. However, in this video, I aim to make it less daunting. I show how you can create a visually stunning particle system with just a few lines of code, demonstrating that it’s not as complex as it may seem.

Other topics covered in this video:

• Flow Fields

• Feedback Loops

• Pixel/TOP math

• Remap and Reorder TOPs

• Instancing Networks

Slope Displacement in TouchDesigner

In this quick tutorial I show how to warp your videos and animations by combining the Slope TOP and Displacement TOP.

Blob Tracker Effect Tool

Get this popular blob-tracking effect as a drag-on operator. It is much more efficient than the Blob Tracker TOP and has unlimited blobs.

Chromatic Aberration

In this Touchdesigner tutorial, I explain how I make the chromatic aberration effect in my vintage lens tool.

Download this project file and get access to Dean’s Vintage Lens tool in the TouchDesigner Tools Collection

Topics covered in this video:

• Slope Displacement

• Reorder TOP

• Normalized Value Viewer

Vintage Lens Effect

With creative options, including chromatic aberration, lens blur, film grain, RGB delay, and vignette, this tool lets you infuse any input with a dose of old-school cool.

Motion Tracer

Get those great plexus style lines generated from motion in a video.

Just drag and drop the tox into your TouchDesigner project, connect a video to the input and you're off.

Customize the line width, color, and add a "squiggle" to it too if you want.

Interactive Particles in 3D with TouchDesigner

Making 3D particle systems is pretty easy, and making interactive particle systems in 2D is pretty straightforward, but how can we make 3d particle systems that are still interactive?

In this tutorial, I explore a simple method for 3d particle interaction using render picking on a single piece of geometry that I then use to interact with a large particle system.

Topics covered in this tutorial  

• Particle Instancing  

• Render Picking  

• Interactive Touch and Mouse input  

• Generating simple UV maps with the GLSL TOP