touchdesignershit

Finally got through most of the Elektronaut vids, so working through some of the Matthew Ragan tuts now. Here are two really good ones demoing two different ways of making a UI that allows you to select an image from a 3x3 grid and display it in a larger window/panel.  https://matthewragan.com/2015/03/29/thp-494-598-image-selector-container-method-touchdesigner/  https://matthewragan.com/2015/03/29/thp-494-598-image-selector-instance-method-touchdesigner/   Some key points that I think are good things to note - Containers are panel types of objects that can be finicky to arrange! However, you can utilise the PANEL CHOP within a container to great advantage - attributes such as "inside" or "rollover" can be used to dim the panel's opacity for example, or maybe a texture TOP that is somewhere. Containers are a bit limited in terms of how you can position them (with any great speed). You're more or less limited to rows and columns, unless you get a little creat...

Use case - you need to preload a bunch of high-res images and then randomly load them into a movie-file-in TOP. (if you just load them straight from a Folder DAT, there might be some lag) Create your Folder DAT as usual, I like to connect a select DAT to this, to trim the irrelevant rows and columns. Make a CHOP thing that can be used to select a number, like a COUNT, call it "index" (we'll use it later) Make a Base Comp (call it something like "images") and inside this, create an IN DAT. Go back up a level and connect your Select DAT to the Base Comp. The Replicator creates a lot (depending on your folder) of nodes, so we use it to keep things tidy. Back inside "images", attach a null to the IN and label it "files" Create a Replicator comp (not attaching it to anything yet) drag over or type in "files" into the Template DAT Table field Create a MovieFileIN TOP, name it "file0" <-that's a zero In this MovieFileIn...

 use case - you have a table in form of the FOLDER DAT, you want to pick from the rows of the table. Lets say they're a list of images. First, lets get rid of the first column, which just lists the filenames. We need the second column that displays a full path. Use a DAT Select node for this. Choose select Rows by Index, set appropriate last number & Columns also by Index (start and end will both be 1). In the MOVIEFILEIN node, you could type - op('NAME')[0,0] to access the image in the first row. However if you want to do something a bit clever and use a CHOP named "INDEX", for example as the number to select the row, you can't just type - op('NAME')[op('INDEX')[0],0]   <THIS WON'T WORK. And Touch Designer won't say why... op('NAME')[int(op('INDEX')[0]),0]  <You have to change the data type to an int!  so, by casting to an INT, the op('....') blabla works.