Creating Components for Hippotizer

To create a component in TouchDesigner that can be used in Hippotizer requires at least a basic knowledge of TouchDesigner concepts before you start, we would recommend viewing some of the many TouchDesigner tutorials on YouTube or via the Derivative website at www.derivative.ca/learn where you can find a host of videos and printed training materials.

Mapping Parameters

For those with a basic knowledge of TouchDesigner, the important thing to know when creating a component for Hippotizer is that Hippotizer matches its parameters to the parameters in TouchDesigner by matching the names of the parameters.

All Float parameters in Hippotizer are named “FloatXX” where XX is a number or index of the float parameter so for example “Float1” or “Float12” are valid names, similarly for integer parameters we use the name “IntXX” for Boolean (on/off) parameters we use “BoolXX” and “StringXX” for text / string parameters.

It is important that the first character is a capital letter and all remaining characters are lowercase, and you must not add any leading zeros to the index, so for example “Float01” would be invalid but “Float1” would be OK.

Your Hippotizer parameters need to be created as Custom Input/Output parameters on the component / container that you are exporting from TouchDesigner, Hippotizer doesn’t care what page or group your parameters are in, it will just try to match the parameter names.
For each parameter you can set a label which will be used inside Hippotizers user interface to label the parameter.
Other parameters such as minimum, maximum and default value will also be read by Hippotizer to display the correct information and to reset values correctly.

Special Parameter

MixRes

In addition to the user parameters for controlling your scene, you can also create a special double parameter called “Mixres”, this should be of type WH in TouchDesigner (width, height) and have 2 channels. If Hippotizer finds this parameter it will populate it with the resolution of the Mix that you created in Hippotizer (or the resolution of your layer if it is on a layer), this can be useful inside your network for deciding what resolution to render at, this is a one-way parameter that is set by Hippotizer and changing its value inside your component will have no effect in Hippotizer.

ForceRes

You can also create another optional parameter named Forceres which should be a bool (toggle) parameter. If Hippotizer finds a parameter with this name it will read the value to decide what to do on it’s output, if the value is true (or if it can’t find this parameter) then it will try to force the output of the mix or the layer to the resolution that you send out of out1 TOP, if the parameter is there but the value is false, then Hippotizer will scale your output from out1 TOP into it’s existing canvas.

Parameters in Hippotizer

Hippotizer will attempt to connect its parameters to matching ones in your file, if you have more parameters than the Hippotizer is set up with then the rest will be ignored.

Video Output

If you are outputting video from your component, then your exported container must include an Out TOP called out1 – this is what Hippotizer looks for to get its video output from TouchEngine.

If you want to use video from Hippotizer, your exported container / component must include between 1 and 8 In TOPs named in1, in2….in8 – the names of these TOPs must be exactly as described otherwise Hippotizer will not be able to find them and connect to them.

Touch Engine Component Template

To make things easy we have created a project called HippotizerContainer.toe that can be downloaded from the support section of our website here: https://support.green-hippo.com , this project contains an example container with all the above parameters already created and named correctly, you can use this as a starting point for your own projects and delete the custom parameters that you don’t need, set the labels and the default values / ranges on the ones that you do.