I am not a blank slate person. Much like an object at rest stays a rest, with me a blank page stays blank. However, as soon as a line, mark, or fuzz lands on that page I'm good to go. Using this as an excuse, continuing to want to learn TouchDesigner, and having just seen a neat game dev tutorial on making lighting, I thought that would be a fun thing to try.

Completed network 

The first problem to solve was how to manage CHOPs to create noise curves with pinned edges, and good feeling movement.

Bolt Component 
Pinning the edges of the noise chop 

Once I had a noise curve with pinned edges, I drew a series of SOP curves with those lines, and rendered them into TOPs. By rendering them at a few thicknesses, I added blur and overlay effects to make the lines seem to glow.

SOPs to make the bolts 

This effect worked pretty well, and by layering multiple copies of these lines over each other got a pretty great effect. The missing effect was, color.

Shader TOP 

I'm a sucker for Chromatic Aberration. It's a neat effect, and I had not used it in a piece of software before! One small problem, I know next to nothing about shaders.

Thanks YouTube. Basic Shader Example

This quick little walkthrough was perfect for a simple shader to push around the different color channels in an image in TD.

uniform vec2 uInputRes, uRedPos, uGreenPos, uBluePos; uniform float uRedScale, uGreenScale, uBlueScale; out vec4 fragColor; void main() { vec2 redPos = uRedPos / uInputRes; vec2 greenPos = uGreenPos / uInputRes; vec2 bluePos = uBluePos / uInputRes; vec4 color = vec4(1.0); color.r = texture(sTD2DInputs[0], vUV.st / uRedScale - redPos).r; color.g = texture(sTD2DInputs[0], vUV.st / uGreenScale - greenPos).g; color.b = texture(sTD2DInputs[0], vUV.st / uBlueScale - bluePos).b; fragColor = TDOutputSwizzle(color); }

I'm pretty happy with the final result here, it was a great learning experience for TD touching on so many of its components with a dash of shaders on top.

Bolts 

<- TouchDesigner First Steps Pt. 1 - Ridge Animation

Jordan C. Parsons

TouchDesigner First Step Pt. 3 - Slit-Scanning ->