VJ://VISUALSSS is a custom-built VJing software built on top of TouchDesigner. My goal with the software was to build a live performance tool that could fit my needs. I wanted to have the capability to pull in live camera feeds and audio signals.

The Journey

In 2017 I played my first show as a VJ. I had 10 or so TouchDesigner scenes that I switched between manually. Once I got to around 20 scenes manual switching was burdensome and I began creating a UI.

Pipeline

The first layout of the software is the input layer. This is where live audio, video feeds, and other external sources are pulled in, processed, and dispatched out.

Content is generated across 8 individual layers each running on it’s own instance of TouchDesigner.

Layer Instances

Since TouchDesigner is single threaded I quickly ran into the problem of a single scene causing everything to lag. This was especially troublesome when the lag was caused by the scene loading in assets and not bad framerate.

Eventually I landed on having each one of my layers render a scene and run on a isolated instance of TouchDesigner. I didn’t use the Engine COMP because that would prevent me from editing the network on the spot.

Colors

Global color pallete that is used throughout the scenes.

Dynamic Text

What started as having the DJ’s name use throughout the content soon became a fully dynamic text system. Defaults are set based on the DJ, event, and venue. There is then controls that allows me to set these variables manually.