TouchDesigner Keyboard Shortcuts + Operator Acryonyms + Tutorials

TouchDesigner Keyboard Shortcuts

TouchDesigner is slightly counterintuitive in that it does not conform to some of the ui behaviors you might be familiar with from Adobe programs or similar.

keynamedescription
i"in"go into a gray operator
u"up"go "up" a level from your current location
h"home"view all nodes that are part of your network
tab"OPCreate Dialog"view the Op Create dialog
right click + dragmulti-selectselect multiple nodes
p"paremeters toggle"show or hide the parameters window for the selected operator

TouchDesigner Operator Acronyms

TouchDesigner, additionally, has some proprietary terminology that might be intimidating, but is an attempt to organize the myriad of operators or nodes within the program.

NameWhat it stands forWhat it does
TOP"Texture OPerators"image creation / 2D operations
CHOP"CHannel OPerators"numerical values
SOP"Surface OPerators"3D operations
DAT"DATa operators"information, text
COMP"COMPonent operators"UI elements, rendering (cameras, lights)

Tutorials

(note that this is not meant to substitute for in-class instruction, nor are you obligated to look at this material. It is presented here if you prefer following along with YouTube, and/or would like to jump ahead a little bit. )

Here's the playlist where the above video comes from. Anecdotally, most of these videos respond pretty well to being at 1.5x speed.

here's a playlist if you're feeling precocious, about using the MediaPipe plugin to do handtracking