Interactive Fire Particles - TouchDesigner Tutorial 001

TouchDesigner Tutorial 001 - Interactive Fire Particles
In this beginner friendly tutorial, you will learn how to create an interactive fire tornado with TouchDesigner. The particle system can be controlled by a Kinect or any other CHOP data.
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0:00 Intro & Overview
0:47 Particle System Setup
3:32 Instancing Data & Geometry
6:35 Feedback Loops
8:55 Kinect Control
9:55 Outro

[@unveil7762]

If you add wind in the opposite direction where you move and force of that wind is exponential to the mouse velocity than you get a better motion :-)

[@reflekkt_net]

Thanks for the hint 👍 Might try to create some more 'elements' with particles and will try that!

[@leandrolucchesi962]

Thank you so much for this tutorial! I'm a beginner and when i place "kinect1" with skeleton seated it doesn't show anything in its window, infact i can't move the fire tornado. How can i fix this? Thank you :)

[@gusta723]

hola algiuen me puede decir como saco el cuadro de Annotate por favor. soy nuevo en esto muchas gracias de antemano

[@TheClumsyAcrobat]

Hey thanks for the tutorial
I am facing an issue though
My render never rendered anything…
I finished the rest of the program to try and fix it later but so far haven’t been able to
Thoughts?

[@TheClumsyAcrobat]

To add to that my geo occasionally flickers a yellow exclamation mark
And I’ve narrowed the cause to the VZ in instancing 2

[@johndoherty8993]

Hi Reflekkt, thanks for the video great stuff, i have a question, is there a way to add this effect to a custom geo like adding it to a ball or pyramid so it looks like the ball and pyramid are on fire ?

[@reflekkt_net]

Hi and thank you!
Yes you can use any SOP as particle emitter/particle source. Just connect the SOP that you want to come the particles out of to the top input of particleSOP. if you add a sortSOP inbetween and set it to random, you the particles get spawned randomly across the points of your SOP instead of following an order.

[@lostdeer4411]

Thank you for the beautiful tutorial! As a beginner I have 2 questions here:
1. When & Where did you set the variable "scale"? sorry if i simply missed it
2. Is "kinect" CHOP not supported on Mac because I couldn't find it

[@reflekkt_net]

I'm glad you like it!
1. From 4:00 to 4:30 we create the "scale" value and at 6:04 we set this value in our Geometry under the instancing tab in Scale X, Y and Z parameter.
2. There are no Kinect drivers for Mac, because it's a Microsoft product. So Kinect is not supported on Mac. I read that there is a way to install a Windows environment with Bootcamp, maybe that's a possible workaround for you.

[@damilarejames5146]

I just got a Kinect and I'm glad I came across your tutorial
I'm pretty much a beginner in TD
So there a place in the tutorial (sop to chop) where you typed in (tx ty tx vx vz age life) on my touch designer it doesn't active...it shows error... please could you help.Thank you

[@reflekkt_net]

Did you turn on the 'Custom' toggle in soptoCHOP? Then you should be able to set the values. Let me know if you still have questions.

[@jjlyonsound]

I am also experiencing this with custom turned on@@reflekkt_net sopto flags the following:
warning: unknown attribute "p".
error: the scopes expand to a different number of words

[@zacheryfanning2739]

The Kinect chop uses the Xbox Kinect, correct? I'm setting this up using the Kinect 2.0 and it's not returning any data, but everything in the code is correct, and there's no issues with the hardware.

[@reflekkt_net]

Do you have the Kinect SDK 2.0 installed? Sounds like maybe there's some drivers missing?

[@zacheryfanning2739]

@@reflekkt_net I do, I've gone through and updated all the drivers I could find.