TouchDesigner Event London
June, 2025
After a lot of time away from work and anything social, in June I was able to go to the first TouchDesigner event organized by Derivative in London. I wanted to see people, I wanted to see people using TD and I wanted to check out the SCENE! Apart from different UK places, people actually came from all parts of the world - a person making games from Poland, brother Gerritsens from the Netherlands, a programmer from Canada who got into TD, a friend of a friend from Hungary. There was even another child apart from my daughter - Rich and Miyu Burns came with their son from Japan. The presentation that I submitted for the event was easy. I wanted to present a hobby project rather than a highly professional industry product. It is important that somebody speaks about simple things too to keep the fun going. I didn't think anybody would be impressed by Shadow Engine and was surprised that people actually liked it. It seemed that the idea of producing nice looking visual patterns from filming shadows of a 3D scene rather than using any shaders was simple and cool. After the talk some came to say a few words including Toby Spark, a VJ that I learned about when I just moved to the UK and was going to VJ London events as a spectator trying to figure out how to become a VJ myself. I would have nothing to talk about with all those artists back then. My only usual question would be "Which software do you use?" So I felt very glad that now I could have a conversation :D
Apart from VJing, other topics that interested people were of course point clouds - with two presentations covering techniques to create such visuals; machine learning - as used in recognizing emotions expressed by dance movement, TD education in UK universities, industries using TD - even automotive guys now want to have immersive cars! It was interesting to note that live VJing seemed to have moved into online spaces - VR chat concerts and Twitch streams. I would be curious to chat with people attending those online events about how they feel and what it means to them. Is it like big part of their life such concerts? After the talks there was a bit of VJ jamming. Everyone could connect to a LAN and share the wall space to beam their NDI video feeds onto. It was a bit like Crux jams, people with their heads into their laptops but not many people dancing and watching.
pics by Toby