6 SOPs

Many projects involving projection mapping, real-time 3D motion capture, architectural LED facade installations, and layered video players, would either be impossible or extremely difficult without the SOP family of operators.

TouchDesigner 088 currently supports the following 3D file types:

• .obj

Keeping Operators from cooking needlessly is essential to smooth performance, which will be discussed further in the ‘Optimization’ section of the book. This is even more important when it comes to SOPs. Always try to apply transform animation data to a Geometry COMP instead directly of to a SOP. This is because SOP transformations happen on the CPU, and the transformation must be performed for every vertex that is present in the geometry. Component level transformations are applied to the 3D geometry, or object, as a whole, and are performed on the GPU as a single operation. A single operation performed on the GPU is much preferred when compared to what could amount hundreds or thousands of operations performed on the CPU.