I want to use the sudo random noise from the noise CHOP to drive the vertical position of my circle in my circle TOP. In this example I’m going to use a noise CHOP and a circle TOP. We can start this by first talking about how we connect two operators from different families. In the image above we actually are referencing the same CHOP in four different ways. In this example we’ll look at connecting a CHOP to a TOP, and all of the different ways we might do that. Specifically, let’s look at how we might connect one family of operators to another. Let’s start by looking at the typical kinds of referencing that you might do on any project.
Expressions are something that I continue to learn more about, and open up all sorts of opportunities for faster, more streamlined, and more elegant programming. I started thinking about this when I saw a post on the Derivative forum from a new user struggling with understanding what I’d written in some earlier tutorials. In many of the other posts that I’ve written I often write about using expressions and references, but haven’t taken much time to talk in depth about what this is, how how it all works.
There are a number of way to create these links with references or expressions. This allows you to link operators that are outside of their respective families – normally you can only connect CHOPs to CHOPs and TOPs to TOPs, but referencing allows you to create connections between nearly any operators. Referencing creates a direct link between two or more floats or integers.
Referencing is one of the most powerful tools at the programmer’s disposal in TouchDesigner.