VJ Software: Derivative's TOUCH 101

In mid October 2001, I had the opportunity to visit with Greg Hermanovic and the Derivative crew, developers of the new VJ Software, Touch101. Now I have to admit, you need a pretty powerful machine to run their software, and my current laptop doesn't have enough VRAM to run their software. In fact, as of my visit, only two laptops in the world had enough 3D acceleration, one of which being the high end Dell Inspiron series. It's now Jan 2002, and I'm still on my old laptop, due to many other expenses and priorities, but in the near future, I'm really looking forward to exploring the awesome power of the Touch series of products! If you have a PC with a GeForce2 or beyond, I highly recommend checking Touch out!

Perform visuals live on your PC.

Play Touch Synths - Download Touch synths from the growing online collection of artworks by the Touch community.

Rich 2D / 3D Visuals - Play synths which are realtime 2D and 3D animations with the benefit of 3D lighting, multi-layer textures, transparency, fog. Touch plays movies and image loops on rectangles and 3D surfaces.

Control Panels - Perform visuals using on-screen control panels and keyboard/mouse hotkeys.

Sync to Music Tracks - Play Touch synths with built-in MP3 tracks or perform visuals on top of your own music tracks. Tap in the beat to sync up.

Realistic to Abstract - Touch is designed for realistic images as well as abstract non-photoreal imaging, including image smears, ghosting, time-trails, soft looks as well as the hard edges.

Fluid Imagery - TouchPlayer synths generate layers of fluid 3D movement through filtering, delays, triggers, time stretching, random distortion, multi-move blending and more.

Electronic Music Roots - Touch's architecture is heavily influenced by analog music synthesizers and their digital offspring. Touch is a visual synthesizer, where synth concepts like signal flow and movement are applied to generating and controlling 3D imagery.

The Synth contains the Code - Synths contain all the textures and instructions TouchPlayer uses to build your visuals in 3D. It's all encoded with Derivative's Academy Award-winning procedural technology.

TouchMixer includes all TouchPlayer features plus:

MIDI In - Control your Touch synths with MIDI buttons, sliders, program changes, clock events and system exclusive messages. Re-map any of your MIDI devices to Touch synth channels.

MIDI Out - Output Touch synth parameters to other MIDI equipment as MIDI notes, controllers, program changes, clock pulses and other events.

Performance Record - Record your performed MIDI, mouse and on-screen control inputs into a segment of animation channels. Record multiple segments while listening to any sections of your music track.

Performance Edit - Edit all your recorded segments on a timeline. Then watch your full edit as a live playback. Post your edit as a Touch Track on the internet or send it to others. They can in turn replay the edit of your performances in TouchPlayer or TouchMixer.

Check out an interactive demo/explanation of TouchMixer!

Output-to-Movie - Record your synth edit into Quicktime movie files or snapshot TIFF and JPEG stills.

Drop in your own Movies and Textures - Customize Touch synths by substituting their textures, movies and video loops with new imagery.

Full Screen - Display your images in full-screen and full-resolution for live performances.

TouchDesigner is a full 3D animation tool designed for real-time performance. It gives you access to all the features you need to make rich visuals for TouchPlayer and TouchMixer.

Visual Node-based Editing - Build your entire synth graphically using visual networks of nodes, connected to make your 3D models, control panels, motions and behaviors. TouchDesigner lets you build synths graphically without requiring any scripting.

Procedural Data Flow Inside - Touch is a fully procedural engine inside, with a user interface that facilitates visual editing and testing of its procedural networks of operators.

OP-node Architecture - Four kinds of operators integrate in Touch - SOPs manipulate 3D surfaces, COPs create and composite images, CHOPs affect channels and motion, and objects are hierarchies of 3D surfaces, lights and cameras.

Procedural Modeling - Combine Touch's 50+ SOPs (Surface Operators) to create and modify polygons, NURBS / Bezier patches and curves as well as metaballs. This complements TouchDesigner's interactive 3D surface modeler.

Motion and Behaviors - Combine Touch's 50+ CHOPs (Channel Operators) to generate and control your synth's motion and behavior. CHOPs takes inputs from all the devices, processes and combines them, matches selected moves to the beats, and drives the 3D objects in real-time. CHOPs complements TouchDesigner's keyframing.

Control Panels - Build your synth's on-screen control panels interactively.

Materials and Textures - Apply textures, video loops, transparency and shading to your 2D and 3D models.

Particles - Build and animate particle systems.

Compositing - Combine Touch's 20+ COPs (Composite Operators) to prepare images as texture maps and loops.

Importers - Import models from other 2D and 3D tools as polygon, NURBS and bezier surfaces and curves. Import motion, lighting, cameras and images.

VEX and Scripting - Modify surfaces, images and motion with Touch's award-winning vector expression (VEX) and scripting languages.

Please visit Derivative's website, to download their products (PC only) & find out more info.

Buy TouchMixer for $200 (comes with 8 free CD's (5.5 GB) of VJ Loops)
Buy TouchDesigner for $1200 (only until the end of January, then $1999 regular price)