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Dean Cheesman
United States
Приєднався 25 кві 2006
Hey there! I’m Dean Cheesman, a creative technologist obsessed with turning wild ideas into immersive, interactive experiences. From large-scale installations for The Utah Jazz, The Seattle Seahawks, and Qualtrics to custom lighting that rocks live shows, I’ve got you covered.
I’m fluent in TouchDesigner, Fusion 360, Cinema4D, After Effects, Arduino, and digital fabrication-basically, if it involves tech and creativity, I’m all in. My knack for blending technical skills with audience engagement turns ambitious concepts into reality.
Always up for new projects, collaborations, or just a good chat about art, tech, and community. Let’s create something amazing together!
I’m fluent in TouchDesigner, Fusion 360, Cinema4D, After Effects, Arduino, and digital fabrication-basically, if it involves tech and creativity, I’m all in. My knack for blending technical skills with audience engagement turns ambitious concepts into reality.
Always up for new projects, collaborations, or just a good chat about art, tech, and community. Let’s create something amazing together!
Text Particle Transitions in TouchDesigner
Add this effect to your lyric video or use it to fancy up your captions on your next social post.
This method isn’t limited to text through. You could replace the text SOPs with all sorts of shapes, geometry, etc to transition between.
My Patreon supporters get access to the project file for this tutorial, along with all my other tutorial project files and custom-built tools. www.patreon.com/DeanCheesman
As a freelancer, I'm always excited to collaborate on new projects. If you're interested in working together, let's chat!
deancheesman.com/contact
This method isn’t limited to text through. You could replace the text SOPs with all sorts of shapes, geometry, etc to transition between.
My Patreon supporters get access to the project file for this tutorial, along with all my other tutorial project files and custom-built tools. www.patreon.com/DeanCheesman
As a freelancer, I'm always excited to collaborate on new projects. If you're interested in working together, let's chat!
deancheesman.com/contact
Переглядів: 3 040
Відео
Create Time Machine Warp Effects with TouchDesigner
Переглядів 4,1 тис.3 місяці тому
You can make any video look like it is dancing to your audio track with this fun technique of combining beat detection and the Time Machine TOP. As a bonus, I added a simple motion-driven bloom/flash effect. My Patreon supporters get access to the project file for this tutorial, along with all my other tutorial project files and custom-built tools. www.patreon.com/DeanCheesman As a freelancer, ...
Blob Tracking Effect with TouchDesigner
Переглядів 9 тис.4 місяці тому
I’m expanding on my first video of blob tracking and tracing. This time, it includes some new things, like how to zoom inside the blob tracking rectangles, splicing out a subsection of blobs for tracing, and effects. You can download the video I used from Pexels: www.pexels.com/video/light-city-road-traffic-4062991/ By becoming a supporter on Patreon, you’ll gain access to the unique project fi...
Interactive Installation Particle Systems with TouchDesigner
Переглядів 6 тис.4 місяці тому
This tutorial combines optical flow feedback with particle systems. This technique is great for making interactive installations with cameras or dynamic rendered video content. This effect is done primarily in TOPs with feedback loops for both the position and velocity. You can download the masked dancer video I used from Pexels: www.pexels.com/video/fire-performance-at-night-14524402/ By becom...
Make Kinect Point Cloud Particles with TouchDesigner
Переглядів 4 тис.5 місяців тому
In this TouchDesigner tutorial I’ll show you how to take the particle cloud input from a Kinect V2, filter out the points you don’t want, and add color and movement effects. These techniques can be combined with many of the other particle effects we’ve covered in these tutorials The project file is available to my Patreon supporters. Get it and all my other files and tools here: www.patreon.com...
Make Text Move Like Particles in TouchDesigner
Переглядів 5 тис.5 місяців тому
In this tutorial you’ll learn how you can move text around as if it were a particle, but still maintaining all the font metrics, kerning, etc that you want from text rendering. The Geo Text comp is our key tool in this and we’ll learn how to use some of its special functions to make generative and interactive effects with text. Other topics covered in this tutorial: - Operator Snippets - UV Rem...
Audio-reactive Voxel Ripples In Touchdesigner
Переглядів 4,4 тис.5 місяців тому
In this tutorial, we combine a few different techniques for some generative visual goodness-audio reactivity, optical flow feedback effects, and instancing with tops. By becoming a supporter on Patreon, you’ll gain access to the unique project file for this tutorial, along with all my other tutorial project files and custom-built tools. patreon.com/DeanCheesman As a freelancer, I'm always excit...
Force Field Particle Effects In TouchDesigner
Переглядів 2,4 тис.6 місяців тому
This effect was a happy accident that came out of my experiementing with making a stipple effect using instanced force fields in TouchDesigner. I think there's a lot more that can be done with this technique so I thought I'd share! Other things you might learn in this tutorial: * Particle Instancing * Force Field Textures * Smooth Normalizing Textures By becoming a supporter on Patreon, you’ll ...
Flocking Effect in TouchDesigner Tutorial
Переглядів 3 тис.6 місяців тому
I’ve tried doing this in TouchDesigner for years and have finally figured it out. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a particle effect that combines all three forces a flocking algorithm requires: attract, repel, and follow. Other things you might learn in this tutorial: * Optical flow feedback for liquid effects * Rotate To function for 2D particles * Advanced rendering techniques By...
Audio Reactive Kaleidoscope Visuals with TouchDesigner Tutorial
Переглядів 3,9 тис.6 місяців тому
Dive into this TouchDesigner tutorial creating generative audio-reactive kaleidoscope visuals. Perfect for all skill levels, we'll break down complex concepts into simple steps. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a one-of-a-kind, attention-grabbing visual setup that reacts to audio in real-time. More importantly, you’ll acquire practical insights that can be directly applied to a myriad o...
GLSL Particle Simulations in TouchDesigner Tutorial
Переглядів 7 тис.6 місяців тому
GLSL Particle Simulations in TouchDesigner Tutorial
Slope Displacement in TouchDesigner
Переглядів 1,6 тис.6 місяців тому
Slope Displacement in TouchDesigner
Blob Tracking Effect Tool for TouchDesigner
Переглядів 7 тис.6 місяців тому
Blob Tracking Effect Tool for TouchDesigner
Chromatic Aberration in TouchDesigner
Переглядів 1,4 тис.7 місяців тому
Chromatic Aberration in TouchDesigner
Vintage Lens Effect Tool for TouchDesigner
Переглядів 8417 місяців тому
Vintage Lens Effect Tool for TouchDesigner
Motion Trace Effect tool for TouchDesigner
Переглядів 1,9 тис.7 місяців тому
Motion Trace Effect tool for TouchDesigner
Interactive Particles in 3D with TouchDesigner
Переглядів 2,6 тис.7 місяців тому
Interactive Particles in 3D with TouchDesigner
Flow Field Particles in TouchDesigner - All TOPs!
Переглядів 5 тис.7 місяців тому
Flow Field Particles in TouchDesigner - All TOPs!
Controlling DMX lights with TouchDesigner
Переглядів 3,4 тис.7 місяців тому
Controlling DMX lights with TouchDesigner
No Code Fluid Dynamics in TouchDesigner
Переглядів 1,9 тис.7 місяців тому
No Code Fluid Dynamics in TouchDesigner
Trace and Blob Tracking Effect with TouchDesigner
Переглядів 39 тис.7 місяців тому
Trace and Blob Tracking Effect with TouchDesigner
Reaction Diffusion Tutorial in TouchDesigner
Переглядів 1,4 тис.7 місяців тому
Reaction Diffusion Tutorial in TouchDesigner
We made a high tech escape room inside a shipping container
Переглядів 41310 місяців тому
We made a high tech escape room inside a shipping container
If we'd just stand still - Dean Cheesman
Переглядів 34710 місяців тому
If we'd just stand still - Dean Cheesman
LED Ampersand - The Moth & The Flame Intro
Переглядів 60310 років тому
LED Ampersand - The Moth & The Flame Intro
Thank you
Glad you liked it!
Is there anyway to export these effects as an alpha layer without the background once the effect is fully built?
For sure. You can do RGB+a outputs with ProRes, png sequences, etc
hey! thank you for the video :) my text is on the right side overlapping itself, I took some steps back to see what I did wrong but it seems good so I don't know what happened..
Maybe check out my newer tutorial. I feel like I explain it better there.
Dean, thank you so much for your detailed breakdown on this. Can you help me, I have followed all your steps but now I am trying to export just an alpha layer of the effects without the background video file. I am not very familiar with the program and I'm sure there is a way to deactivate the original video file to leave only the effects applied. Thanks in advance!
Yep. Moviefileout top with formats that support alpha.
Oooo so nice! Thanks! Any idea how to replace the Text SOP with a GeoText (with animated text)? I can't figure out how to retrieve the proper tx ty tz, the only thing I get from the Chop to is a spendid diagonal. I am pretty sure I am missing something pretty important but I can't wrap my head around it??
So you’re trying to make the particles letters themselves?
@@DeanCheesmannot really. I am trying to have a full animation with letters in a GeoText. And then, from that geoText sketch, allow the letters to explode as particles when ‘touched’ by the mouse or any external interaction. Basically like what UVA did recently.
27:26 what is the hotkey that you'v done?
I think you’re asking about the “a” shortcut to activate the chop so I can drag it onto a parameter? Is that what you were asking?
Is this tool available to be used in the free version of this software?
Yep
thank you so much for this TUT! just wanted to ask how i could make my lines thinner?
In the material parameters
I’m having a hard time getting my camera to show anything. It just shows the starter image after I try to connect it to geometry. How would I fix this?
I’m sorry. Can you explain a little more? Maybe let me know the timestamp in the video where you’re having the problem.
the settings work perfect when using a video with the same aspect ratio. I use references instead of typing the 9/16 values to ensure reproducibility. when i switch to a video with the aspect of 1280x720, the lines get all messed up and I end up using an ortho width of 1.
The trace lines are just using the uv space, so that would throw things off, you need to make sure the UV space is calculated based on the resolution of the image. I think I did a better job explaining it in my newer video
I appreciate you responding to my comment. Thank you so much for your videos. I just noticed you had a newer one so I will check that out. Instances like this remind me that I don’t need to be so stressed about doing everything exactly the same and to leave room for improvisation and experimentation.
@@DeanCheesman same here, can't really tell how to fix the uv space when my boxes will really follow the movement, now it's big and random
i need the pro version to do this?
The built in blob tracker only does two blobs in the free version. I do have an advanced blob tracker that I built from scratch that can actually do unlimited blobs. Available to my Patrons.
Is it possible to change the particle material to multiple textures?
Explain what you mean a little more. Like have two different sources of the material color?
@@DeanCheesman For example, I want to change the particle material to multiple textures similar to "leafs" in the plugin "ParticleGPU", a combination of various types of leaves.
Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for watching! Be sure to share anything you make from it. I love seeing it.
love it
in your tutorial about blobl tracking, you used an edge, threshhold and different to mimic some sort of motion detection, can i just scrap that and use optical flow instead
Cache and difference won’t give you as much information as optical flow can (direction and magnitude) but is less “expensive” to process. So the answer is “it depends”
thanks for your time to explain. you helped me a lot to learn on TD.
Glad to hear it!
hey dean! your videos are awesome and so helpful. I have a question about the text on the video. I followed the steps, but for some reason my text is isolated to one stationary spot in the bottom left corner of the screen. Do you know what i could've done wrong to keep the text in that area instead of scattering across the screen like the blob tracking is supposed to do?
It’s likely because of the conversion from UV (0-1) to pixel space. I made a newer video that might explain it better. Blob Tracking Effect with TouchDesigner ua-cam.com/video/qH94dipCJiw/v-deo.html
Hello author, this is a very good tutorial teaching very detailed, I am a beginner in it encountered some problems do not know how to solve, at 18:20 of the video after entering the code, my gls reported an error, but I do not know how to solve, can you tell me, I should do this, the error content is written like this:warning:The GLsL shader has compile errors (use info DAT to see details ).(/project/gls)
The dat to the right of your glsl code should show the error. What does that say?
@@DeanCheesman warning:The GLsL shader has compile errors (use info DAT to see details ).(/project/gls)
I may have missed this, so forgive me, but how do I make sure my box colors never go black, or just never turn into a very dark color uniformly?
Hmm. Did you add the light to the scene? I might need a little more info on what did work.
@ Thank you for looking into it. I have added 2 lights, and an environment light with Dimmer at 1. So, I get the feeling something else is going on with the color, and I’d rather have more color results than majority of it going dark. Happy to send .toe file if needed.
beautiful work,thank you for this awesome tutorial...how to make it interactive with the camera? do you have a tutorial? thank you very much.
Check out my Interactive Motion Particles tutorial. That might help you out.
Thanks Dean for sharing, for sure i will put this into practice at some point.
Thank you!
Hey Dean, Great video man. Im just getting into TouchDesigner and IM LOVING your way of motion detection. Very easy to follow! Thank you!
Hey thanks!
Hi, I just discovered your channel and TD, how can I use the camera like you do for my future videos?
Hey! Thanks for coming by. I just take my video device in chop and do a little crop then right click and hit view.
how can i connect anything to comp geo? i can't do itttt please answerrrrr
If you drag out from your SOP and while you’re still holding the wire you hit tab to add your geo it will add it with an input.
Love this! Is there any way for me to format the text to be at the bottom of the rectangles? I have the idea of concatenating some text like "ID, Xposition, Yposition - custom text" and have it left or centre aligned to the bottom of the blob, I was looking into offsets or something but I'm pretty much brand new to this so unsure on where to go.If you have any ideas that would be amazing!
You could feed the blob data through some eval DATs to calculate those positions
amazing tutorial. love the camera feed webcam viewer. very elegant.
When you’ve got a TD hammer everything is nail
amazing tutorial. thank you so much for sharing this
You’re welcome 😊
man i gotta work on my misophonia cos that frog in the throat is KILLING me 😭
Ah man. You think it was bad for you! I couldn’t shake that throat tickle for like four weeks!
Thanks for sharing video. Easy to understand.
You're welcome!
How can I do this effect with a Kinect V1? It doesn't have the option to activate the color point cloud ):
You can do something similar by just filtering out the depth map and assigning uv values with a regular old uv map (red and green gradients).
When I drag the null to my feedback_pos (14:50 in video) I get a yellow screen with nothing to see, what's the problem?
It means your uv values keep going up. Probably something in your optical flow feedback. Either that network isn’t a 32 bit float network (allowing negative numbers) or your values are not strong enough/weak enough to come back towards zero when nothing is happening. A simple reset of your feedback loops might also fix the problem if you haven’t done that.
It just looks beautiful. Thank you very much for this great tutorial.
Thank you! Cheers!
Very well made! I am facing an issue with light that doesn't have any effect when I turn on shadows. Any idea?
A few potential things. The light has a “cone” so if it’s not facing your objects at an angle you won’t get shadows. Also sometimes you might need to pump up intensity. Also if there is competing light you might need to pull other intensity values down.
is there any way to implement your blob and motion tracking tools available on patreon in this workflow? id love to try this, but my non-commercial version won't allow me to use more than 2 blobs when tracking? thanks!
Just updated my tool on Patreon. It’s a new built from scratch blob tracker that should work.
@ thanks a bunch! i’ll check it out asap 😊
Thanks Dean, very easy to follow, much appreciated!
You bet!
Amazing
Thank you!
I'm a Machine Learning professional who was planning to do blob tracking in code, until I learned it is possible in TD. I did the usual beginner tutorials but this is my first end to end project. This video is fantastic and I could replicate your work. Having you explain clearly why you were doing each step was a big help for me too. It made sure that I wasn't just copying steps, but learned why I was doing each step. You are a real teacher. Keep up the amazing work.
Thanks for sharing!
Oh, sounds very cool, I'm working with ML/AI too, interesting for what a kind project u neeed a blobtracking?
@@sesh7606 It's nothing related to work. I have a side hustle as a music production duo and I do a lot of creative coding and art for that. TouchDesigner definitely saved me a lot of time which I would have spent coding.
Thanks o much 🎉🎉
You’re welcome 😊
hey! quick question, when I connect text1 to final comp1 (last part to add the text coordinates to the video) text is only showing in the corner of the video; any suggestions what i can change ?
I think I explain it in my newer tutorial a little better. Likely a problem converting from UV to pixels.
@@DeanCheesman which one exactly?
Dope! More text based videos plz! Love kinetic type
noted!
the output of the video is not as smooth as the video is, how do I fix it?
Hm... a few options come to mind. Are you turning off the realtime box on the top menu bar before recording your video output?
@DeanCheesman yep that was the problem, thxxx
Crazy good
thank you
Dean, how would you go about converting those numbers to random words? Is there a way to output the text TOP into a list where I can assign random words to it?
In my newer blob tracking video i talk a little more about this, but its been a request a few people have asked about so maybe a tutorial is in order.
I'm using the non-commercial version and keep getting the message "Blob-detection limited to 2 blobs", would there be a way to specifically only set my settings to 2 blobs?
The tool I built (look up that video) has a not-as-good workaround, but I'm working on building some ways to do this. For right now the free version limits you to two.
thanx big man!
You bet!
insanely valuable for patreon
Thanks!
2:54 bro what
I did a terrible job explaining this. Wireframes sort of suck on a Mac. Some sort of weird rendering limitation means that the line material is the only way to get control of line thickness.
@@DeanCheesman Don't worry. ChatGPT helped me out on that one. Thanks for the tutorial.
Awesome! Thank you(: What lights are you using? I would love to get some. Also how many lights can you control at the same time with this setup?
These are just really cheap U’King DMX movers I got off Amazon a while back.
Love this tutorial, learned so much
Glad it was helpful!