just something in the interface, like zooming out or exiting from the sub-patch, nevermind 
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That could get some people the wrong idea as even if 3dMax, Blender, Cinema4D, or even Maya has parts that could work procedurally and be node based, they are not fully procedurally as Houdini is 
(Just my two cents being involved in CGI industry for the last 15+ years).
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sorry…should have put a ‘.’ after ‘etc’
this ‘it’ I was referring to was Houdini
just lazy typing - I’ve been in VFX for 20+ years (and work for SideFX) 
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Cool! I just thought it would be of help clarifying
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anyone else having issue with TD freezing on quit all of a sudden? can’t find any info about it but it basically started hanging every time and I have to Force Quit it, have no idea what happened, just started being like this…
been working on this flying thingy patch, wish I had better skills to draft a spaceship, still, TD is lots of fun
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love this software, I can easily spend hours with it (compression does not do justice here)
(can’t add more replies 
where are all the TD users to bring this thread to life?)
for anyone using SOPs, found this very helpful cheat-sheet post in the TD forum, it has pics for most things to help understand better the function of the SOP
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Is this still the go to guide for learning TouchDesigner? Or does anyone recommend other resources for learning it?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFrhecWXVn5862cxJgysq9PYSjLdfNiHz
I am particularly interested in getting to the point of using gesture recognition (mediapipe) or touchscreen device (phone/tablet) as an input surface to affect a video.
I have tried to learn it mildly during last few months. It is pretty confusing with all the CHOPs, TOPs, SOPs etc. They could be named better imo. TouchDesigner – Matthew Ragan this is the resource I have been using mainly.
My realtime graphics road interest started last fall with Three.JS programming but soon I made my way to Signalculture video synths and then to TD. My naive plan was to build my own javascript visualizer but as for now I’m focusing on TD and the video synths.
TD is such a huge thing that getting good with it requires some true passion, but overall the possibilities it enables are very intriguing. It’s basically a DAW for realtime graphics. Good thing is that it’s been around for so long that there is decent amount of tutorials online available. You just need to gradually dive deeper and keep up with it. One leg after another type of process.
The whole computer graphics topic is such a huge area that one can’t just instantly know everything. Luckily, TD helps in abstracting a lot of it into tweakable parameters without having to deal with too much math.
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Bileam’s tutorials are still the most accessible. The “issue” with TD is that it can do literally anything. It is crucial to know what you want to achieve before diving into it. In your case a better understanding on parametric programming, a little bit of TD specific Python expressions and a little bit of reading the documentation will go a llmg way. Many operators also have good examples, you have to right click on them and opentheir “Operator Snippets”, this will also help a lot!
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Great, thanks for the advice and extra resource.
I have a very clear project in mind, manipulation of video using gestures (or instead a smartphone/tablet as an touch interface). The project already functions in the web, but I want to up the resolution of the video, which I think TD can probably handle HD. I’m on pretty low resolution imagery in the web.
I have good experience with Processing/P5.js, and a little with Max, so I hope I just need to sit down with the right tutorials and guides and follow along. (I really hope it is that easy for me!!).
Edit: I know from when I first tried to learn arduino, that just doing tutorials didn’t help anything stick. To @arctor023 's point, it only really clicked when I had a well defined outcome I needed to create; then it all fell into place.
You should consider, that the non commercial edition of touch designer has a limitation to the max. resolution of 1280 x 1280.
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