Spice Up Your Zoom Meetings with Touch Designer
If you’re one of the fortunate folks who can work from home, the last few weeks have been a crash course in video conferencing. At this point, we’ve all heard “can you guys see my screen?” so many times the words have lost all meaning.
But within every crisis is an opportunity. To make the best of a bad situation, I decided to burn my Saturday morning figuring out how to replace my default webcam in Zoom to something more interesting. Maybe something like this.
Touch Designer is my weapon of choice for any live-rendered visualization and working in it makes my brain OH SO happy. It’s a lucky coincidence that Touch Designer facilitates a wide variety of inputs and outputs which we’ll need to make our Zoom meetings suck less.
It’s ridiculously easy to route your Touch Designer output to a virtual webcam using Spout and the Syphon Spout Out TOP. Then all you have to do is tell Zoom to use this virtual camera and you are off to the races.
Let’s Get Started! Install Spout
I was working on a Windows machine when I did this. So this is gonna be a little Windows-specific, deal with it. You can download Spout at their website. I believe they let their SSL certificate lapse, so you’re gonna see some warnings that the site is insecure. Live dangerously and click the link anyway. When you install Spout, make sure that you’ve checked the SpoutCam box when it asks what other utilities you’d like to install.
Once installation is complete, that’s it! SpoutCam runs automatically and should show up as a webcam in software that accepts camera input. It won’t send any actual video until we send video to it with Touch Designer. So let’s make a really simple Touch Designer app!
I’m going to cruise through the Touch Designer details, if you’d like a more in-depth intro to Touch Designer, why not check out MIR or the fantastic Matthew Ragan.
You can download the TOE file for this project (as well as many other TD projects) at my Github.
Open Up the Boring Webcam
Booooo. Boring webcam. I know I want it to look a little blown out and de-saturated, so I’m running the Video Device In TOP through an HSV Adjust TOP and a LumaLevel TOP. I’m then setting the adjusted webcam texture as the Color Map for a Phong material.
Make Some Particles!
Next, I’m making a very simple particle system. I’m generating particles from a grid that will live well below the camera. Then I’m randomly sorting the grid points with the Sort SOP. I’m using the Point SOP to replace the normals for each point with a new normal that’ll send the particles straight up on the Y axis.
This impossible-to-see screenshot shows a little trick for making your particles start their lives at scale 0, then scale up to 1 at mid-life and back to 0 as they die off. You just have to divide each particles age by its lifetime and use that value as a lookup on a pattern which represents the scale of the particle over its lifespan.
Render Pipeline Time!
This should look super familiar to Touch Designer developers. We’re using our particle system to instance a Sphere SOP.
Let’s Do Some Post-Processing
Now that we’ve rendered out our webcam bubbles, let’s use some noise and displacement to make it look a little more like we’re under water.
Here Comes The Important Bit
This has been all fine and good, but how will Zoom know what we’re doing in Touch Designer? Easy! We just terminate the network in a Syphon Spout Out TOP. This will send the texture to Spout which it will then in turn send as a virtual webcam video feed.
Now Let’s Zip Over to Zoom
The only thing to do now is to tell Zoom to use the new SpoutCam as the default webcam. You can find that option in the Video pane of Zoom’s settings.
You Did It!
Now your meeting just got ten times more rad.
It goes without saying, but anything you could output from Touch Designer would work. You could get super weird with it, which I highly encourage.
