[For Beginners] I want to create a forest with Touchdesigner ww

miwa_maroon
4 min readFeb 12, 2022

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Scattering trees to create a forest

I’m not going to make a forest.
I’m not a recluse.

Source: NARUTO Masashi Kishimoto, Shueisha

Yamato-sensei is the strongest, isn’t he?

Oh, I’m sorry I’m late. I’m miwa maroon.
I’m an engineer at a company that usually posts tutorials and articles for beginners on Touchdesigner~.
I do exhibits, system building, and prototyping~.

Yes! That was a long preamble!
So, here’s what I’m going to make this time!

Click here to see the results of this project

The trees are well scattered in a natural way 🌲🌳.
I’m going to share with you how to disperse these trees!

Tutorial

Please watch this video for an explanation!

I’m going to share with you how to do this!
and then skip right to the video style (lol)

I’m kind of sorry (Peco), but it’s easier to explain in a video. That’s my personality.

In addition, I think it’s easier to understand because I show the whole process in the video.
When I’m doing a tutorial or researching something, I go to Youtube first.
So, since the basics are explained in the video, I’ll focus on the important points and explain them in an extreme way here.

Three important points

Three important pointsa This time, there are three important points.
Only three. But three.

1. COPY SOP’s called fetchstamp.

In this case, I used copy SOP to create the fluffy tree.

The only problem with this is that all the spheres that I’ve distorted with noise sop will be copied in the same shape.
I want to change the shape of each sphere, even if it’s just a little.
That’s you!

If you want to change the shape of each sphere a little bit, you should try fetchstamp, which comes free with the purchase of copy sop.

And fetchstamp is what we call it.
Put fetchstamp(‘seed’, 1) into seed and Amplitude in the noise sop, and you get
Voila, you have a fluffy tree whose shape changes depending on the index of copy.

Click here for more information (fetchstamp)

2. Instancing with light processing

I need to get a lot of wood out!
What method comes to your mind in such a case?

Is it the Copy SOP mentioned earlier?

That’s one way to do it, but Copy SOP tends to be too heavy for a large number of trees.

What I often use in such cases is instancing!
It sounds really difficult, but it’s really easy to use.

Turn on Instancing in geo COMP, and add a CHOP (null2 in this case) containing coordinate information to Translate OP.
Select tx, ty, and tz from ▶.

Instancing is very deep, and you can decide the speed and apply effects individually…

But let’s put aside the difficulties for the moment.
If you want to produce a large amount of something, you can use light processing instancing.
Ur a good guy.

On a side note, I’ve tried instancing in UnrealEngine as well, but it was quite a hassle, and I found touchdesigner to be very useful.

3. Sprinkle SOPs that are not Scatter Nodes

To be precise, it is possible to change the position of the original point irregularly.
Therefore, please insert the Grid SOP into the Input0 of the Sprinkle SOP.

You can use seed to change the randomness, and number of points to determine the number of points.

In Houdini, a node-based 3DCG software, there is a similar function called scatter.
In touchdesigner, it’s Sprinkle.

Hard to understand! I was going to say something like, “It’s hard to tell!” but I don’t want to say anything like that because I’m sure I’ll hear someone say, “You can remember this much.
(Hard to understand, huh?).

So, I’m going to animate it.
I’ll explain it in this article, if you want to take a look.
Link

Hooray!

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miwa_maroon
miwa_maroon

Written by miwa_maroon

I want to bring a smile to someone's life. Use Touchdesigner.