I’ve been deep in ISF shaders lately, building packs for VS-2, and it’s lit a fire under me for realtime visuals in a way I wasn’t expecting. That’s led me into TouchDesigner — and with a 3D/C4D background, the new POPs operator family has been the thing pulling me in hardest. It feels like the missing bridge between how I already think about geometry and a properly realtime, node-based workflow.
While I was down that rabbit hole I came across Derivative’s interview with Brendan Dawes, whose work I’ve followed for years. It’s a genuinely great read, and a few things in it stuck with me.
Dawes made the same jump I’m mid-way through, just from the other direction — Houdini first, TouchDesigner after, having watched a talk that was itself running live inside Touch. His reasoning stuck with me: “this is what a creative tool in a digital age looks like.” He talks about combining simple things — the Unix pipe operator as a metaphor for how Touch’s nodes work — and that’s exactly the appeal of POPs for me: small, composable operations that add up to something none of them do alone.
The piece that really got me was Now Becomes Then — a broadsheet newspaper Dawes made to mark twenty five years since registering brendandawes.com. Instead of a straightforward retrospective, he built a system in TouchDesigner that pulled every project from his site via API, ran each description through a local LLM to generate haikus, and composited the pages using sculptural forms rendered in Houdini from the project titles themselves. Every run produced new compositions. He curated the final pages from hundreds of generated options and printed it as a physical object — twenty five years of digital work, made tactile.
He also used POPs directly for the Beyond Tellerrand 15th anniversary posters — Noise POPs seeded from each speaker’s name, Connectivity POPs building surfaces and lines from the same seed, Subdivide POPs smoothing it all out. A deterministic system built from a person’s name, essentially. That’s the kind of thing I want to get good enough at Touch to build myself.
One line stuck with me beyond the software talk: he encouraged everyone to document their work on a site they actually control, rather than leaving it to Instagram. Fitting advice, on a blog.
Worth reading in full: Becoming Something Else: Brendan Dawes on Play, Systems, and TouchDesigner, and brendandawes.com for the work itself.
