Been interested in how to go about making videos that interact with VCV music and modulations, and Touch Designer is free, so I spent a few days trying to learn some basic tasks in Touch Designer.
This a no sound, no text 4 minute video on how to get VCV Rack to modulate Touch Designer using loopMIDI. In the video, I just get an LFO in VCV Rack to change the size of a sphere in Touch Designer. Real basic and boring, but like with VCV and everything good in life, you have to start somewhere and work hard at it till it clicks. I feel the possibilities of getting your generative modular music to interact with your generative modular video is endless and well worth the steep learning curve.
There’s a complete step-by-step write up in the youtube description.
I would love if anyone got into this too, please share ideas either here or private message, and I am down to do the same as I progress.
Thanks rsmus7! Yeah absolutely, there are so many tutorials available. I haven’t gotten too far down the rabbit hole yet, but I’ve been mostly watching the official Derivative workshop videos off their site and on youtube. here’s a couple that are my favorites so far in the order that i watched them: https://youtu.be/wmM1lCWtn6o (Excellent 3 hour Intro to Touch Designer video) http://www.derivative.ca/Events/2016/NorwayWorkshop/ (i really enjoyed the Audio Visualization Rendering one) https://www.derivative.ca/Events/2015/WorkshopsWestVideos/ (i really liked the SF Workshop Instancing and Rendering Techniques one)
Hi - my two cents.
Touch Designer is not available for my linux…but Blender is - for all platforms. “So what” you may say. Well the new Blender 2.8 (EEVEE) is released VERY soon and there is a midi plugin here http://www.jpfep.net/pages/addmidi/. Blender also natively takes in audio to control object attributes but only based on volume levels (last time I looked). Here’s a demo.
Blender also has Animated Nodes plugin which is mind blowing (to my mind ) This gentleman Midge Sinnaeve has made fascinating music videos/visualizations and tutorials. Here’s his 2018 Showreel and a 2017 Conference talk.
VCV Rack + Blender = psychedelic marriage made in heaven
i would love to dive into this, and i actually briefly looked at touch designer last year. the possibilities are indeed endless.
but this is another rabbit hole for me, that could take a lot of time and energy. i’m sure it’s worth it, but i only have so much time and energy. i already find that working on developing modules for vcv rack is taking my focus away from making music. and i have a hard time dividing my attention on different projects. i’m a fully-focused on one project kinda guy…
I have resolved to sit down and learn Max/MSP/Jitter properly instead of occasionally dipping into it and producing visualisations in combination with VCV is part of my focus.
Wow Blender looks awesome, and I love how it’s free and open source, I may have to check it out before I totally commit to TD. And this Midge guy is so talented, thanks for mentioning him. Looks like you can download some of his VJ loops for free, it would be cool to at least try and gain some knowledge from them.
I hear ya Ben, this stuff really takes some time to learn. I don’t know if it’s even worth it to me yet, but it sure is fun for the moment just seeing what’s out there. I have been a bit uninspired musically for a couple weeks now, so at the very least it’s nice distraction.
That’s cool Nik! Max is pretty crazy. I tried to learn it for audio recently but was a bit overwhelmed by it, and figured i needed the full version(not the Max for Live) to really go nuts with tutorials. Have you had any luck learning the video stuff yet?
@AdiQ In between watching youtube tuts from the usual suspects, I loaded the AddMIDI to Blender 2.80RC2 - it crashed on my linux build
Am contacting the developer. Last post from them was May 2019 on a Blender forum saying “soon”
A different way to create “videos that interact with VCV music and modulations” is using hardware video synthesizers. I’ve been using the LZX Vidiot for some months and it’s very fun. It was mentioned here some weeks ago; if there’s interest about it, I can create a separate thread.
) This gentleman 
