TouchDesigner: Human Particle Emitter

Instagram has become a beacon for creative inspiration. I see interactive tests and experiments on a daily basis that I want to try as soon as possible. Normally I do.  I ran into this super unique particle system test by Gaurav Sharma where he was using human body tracking for a particle system. It was super rad, looked like rotoscoping out of Waking Life or Scanner Darkly with the low frame rate (which even though he seemed dissatisfied with, I personally think it totally added a genuine human charm to it).

 

It got me thinking though, what is taking his frame-rate down? Yes, SOPs in TouchDesigner are notorious CPU killers and Particle Systems are SOP exclusive. Was it the surface area? Was it the size?

 

So I jumped into Touch to play and see if I could recreate his experiment, but entirely differently because I ain't no style thief and I've got personality of my own to express.

 

Turns out, lowering the resolution to Quarter Res of the file that I'm using to trace the SOP from made a world of difference. I went from 18fps to 60fps from that change alone. Below is the .tox file of the method I used. It requires using the Kinect.

 

 

Kinect Human Particle Emmiter .tox