What options are there when making generative art?

- So the first question you might have is how do we go about making generative art? There are a few programs that we could potentially use to actually go about making some art from scratch. Now, the first one that you might think about is Adobe After Effects, which is a fantastic motion and animation program, but it's not really built for generative art. After Effects is really great at having this same input and same output that look exactly the same.

But we want some lack of control to some degree when it comes to making art. We wanna have these different outputs that look very different every single time. So how do we go about making that? Now, another option is to use something like Processing. Processing is also a fantastic tool, but it's not really too beginner friendly. You need to know how to code to be able to use Processing. Now we're gonna assume on this course that you are a beginner, but if you do know how to code, Processing is a fantastic tool.

If you are more of an advanced coder, you wanna make things for the web. There's also our Shaders course that I made as well. So if you enjoyed this course, you might also enjoy our Shaders course too. But the program that we're gonna be using throughout this entire course is called TouchDesigner. Now, TouchDesigner is a program that's specifically made for making things like generative art. It's a fantastic tool, definitely highly recommended, and I really enjoy, I really love to use it, and I think that you will too.

So how do we go about getting TouchDesigner? Well, we need to go to derivative.ca. Derivative is the company that make TouchDesigner. And all we need to do is get it now. So click up here in the corner. There's two download options here. Obviously, I'm on the Mac, so we would click Mac OS Download. Now there are some things we need to think about before we do this. Now if we look at the pricing down here, you'll see that the non-commercial version is free, but there is some limitations to it.

The first limitation is the resolution is limited to 1280 by 1280, which means we can't export things at a massive size. If you do want to export at massive size, there are some paid options for doing this. I have the paid version here. It's definitely worth the money if you are making very high res art or lots of videos, for instance. So I definitely would highly recommend paying for it in the long term if you really enjoy using it.

It saves me a bunch of time, so I definitely highly recommend it. But for this course, we're mainly focusing on non-commercial for just for people learning. All of the stuff that we're gonna be doing is gonna be 1280 by 1280 maximum. So all of this course will support non-commercial versions as well. So the first thing you need to do is just download TouchDesigner. In the next video we'll talk about how we actually use Touch Designer.