Experimental:Operator Family

Experimental - Skipping Glossary There are seven Families of built-in Operators. Of the six families, five are basic operator families and one is the Component family which can further contain networks of operators. Components containing components form the TouchDesigner hierarchy and give rise to the operator Paths.

• COMPs - Components - Object Components (3D objects), Panel Components (2D UI gadgets), and other component types. Components contain other operators.
• TOPs - Texture Operators - all 2D image operations.
• CHOPs - Channel Operators - motion, audio, animation, control signals.
• POPs - Point Operators - 3D points, primitives, polygons, point clouds, particles and GPU-based data operations.
• DATs - Data Operators - ASCII text as plain text, scripts, XML, or organized in tables of cells.
• MATs - Material Operators - materials and shaders.
• SOPs - Surface Operators - legacy 3D points, polygons and other 3D primitives, with some capabilities not possible in POPs yet.

Within each operator family, "generator" operators have 0 inputs and create data, and "filter" operators have 1 or more input and filter data.

Each operator family is a unique color. Only operators of the same family (color) can be Wired together. Many operators have parameters that are references to operators in other families: Links. Also Exporting flows numeric data from CHOPs to all operators.

Custom Operators of family TOP, CHOP, POP, SOP, DAT and SOP can be created using C++, allowing you to extend TouchDesigner's functionality. They will show up in the OP Create Dialog under the 'Custom' tab.

The Graphics Processing Unit. This is the high-speed, many-core processor of the graphics card/chip that takes geometry, images and data from the CPU and creates images and processed data.

An Operator Family that creates, composites and modifies images, and reads/writes images and movies to/from files and the network. TOPs run on the graphics card's GPU.

An Operator Family which operate on Channels (a sequence of numbers (Samples)) which are used for animation, audio, mathematics, simulation, logic, UI construction, and data streamed from/to devices and protocols.

A Operator Family that reads, creates and modifies 3D points, polygons, lines, particles, surfaces, spheres and meatballs. Particles and point clouds are now done primarily on the GPU using TOPs.

An Operator Family that manipulates text strings: multi-line text or tables. Multi-line text is often a python Script or GLSL Shader, but can be any multi-line text. Tables are rows and columns of cells, each containing a text string.