TWID #36: Patch Battle at Deadline
Attending my first demo party to participate at a patch battle using TouchDesigner.
This week I was attending my first demo party and took part in a patch battle, where different node based tools competed against each other.
What is a demo party
There is this thing called demo scene, which in simple terms are people that use computers to create audiovisual content that runs in realtime and oftentimes has a very compact file size.
A demo party is a gathering of the demo scene, where they show off their skills and compete against each other in who is making the best visuals.
What is a patch battle
Usually people from this scene write code to build the visuals or sounds. Some are building their own tools to make it easier to accomplish certain tasks.
There is an alternative approach to writing code in a text based format, which is using nodes that can be patched together to create programs in a visual way.
So in a patch battle, people compete against each other using different node based tools. In this case it had the following format:
Each participant writes down some words to be used as a prompt
Then there are three rounds of 10min where two prompts are drawn and the participants have to create something related to that
Each round is judged by speed (who is first), beauty (applause of audience) and elegance (determined by the participants)
The one with the most points wins
The patch battle at deadline
The event I attended was the deadline demo party, which happens once a year in Berlin. And we were four people using different tools for the challenge:
Pixtur - The creator of tooll
Pandur - The creator of cables
A person I forgot the name - Using blender geometry nodes
Me - Using TouchDesigner
There were three rounds with the following prompts.
Plattenbau and Glyphs
This one I totally fucked up due to being excited and TouchDesigner not working as expected. The other tools did quite well on that. Especially blender which is pretty good in creating models of buildings. But tooll was even better in terms of speed and how the results looked like.
Black, white and Noise
This one was made for me, since this is what I do the most. The other tools did not so well on creating abstract shapes in this way.
Mountains and Acid
This is where all of the tools worked well and we had a nice battle of different interpretations of the prompts and how to use it.
Conclusion
I was last place at the battle but it was a lot of fun and quite an honour to be playing against people so well known in the scene and who are building their won tools, that I really admire. Using prompts to make visuals is also really nice to go into directions you would not go otherwise and a great way to practice different approaches on how to do certain things.
Other things I did this week
Animations
Drawing
That’s it for this week. Hope you liked it.