Firstly, so sorry for the quite unattractive and vague title. As someone who started with them both at the same time, this question has been bugging me for a while.
I acknowledge the basic differences such as the UI and Windows/Mac compatability but I couldn’t go deep enough where one can actually say one is better than other because of this and that. I also realize this is not a black/white area where most of the things can be managed with them both. But I mean creative wise, have you had any experiences or heard of where one of them fall short from the other on a particular subject?
If you started them both at the same time and you still haven’t found an answer to your question, this just means that you still did not hit the bottom of neither platform.
Experiment, study, etc a little more and a little deeper: you’ll then find that your question has no longer any meaning, as you’ll be busy doing stuff.
I realize this has very little meaning to it but heard a lot of stories which people switched from one to another. And I want to learn what caused them to - to be more specific, this will help me decide which one to go deeper with. I mean it takes serious amount of time to become an advanced user and I want to make the right choice as it will take a lot of time an effort clearly.
Not trying to start a fight here just wanted to hear your thoughts, there are loads of topics I read about such comparisions, just wanted to hear more thoughts from the people who actually dove all the way down. Thanks for the warm welcome by the way :-)
Thanks, I read that topic actually, I mean of course I made a search before posting but then realized that thread is almost 5 years old. So I thought maybe after 5 years, opinions and softwares might have changed.
So far, only thing I can relate to arguments in that thread is the minimalist beauty of vvvv.
don`t remember who told that: “with touchdesigner it’s easy to start (one project) and harder to finish, with vvvv - it’s harder to start and easier to finish”.
vvvv isn’t missing something (indispensable) that td has and viceversa.
So, IMHO, people change because they know people using more often one tool than the other, or because they’re fanboys, or because personal taste, or because they find one tool more fitting to their knowledge, or because…
If you want to be a “multimedia” professional, you should study and practice software day and night. Time should be relevant only when it comes to deadlines (and you should have lethal deadlines only when you’re pro).
Doesn’t matter how you look at it, it’s hard work anyway…
Me neither, I just gave you the most honest answer I had in my pocket. It wasn’t what you expected, but believe me, it’s fitting to your question more than one can get at first glance.
And in any case…For example, everybody here says “no way man, go full vvvv for this, this and that reason”, then one day you’ll find that td it’s the best for what you want to do… Who to blame then for all the time spent on the wrong tool?
Thanks so much for the answer, for now I think I’ll go on with both and let destiny decide for me. I mean naturally it seems vvvv will be dismissed in my personal practices due to my main domain which is mac - I use a lot of OSC between other softwares via ethernet etc. So it seems vvvv will be a bussiness endevaour and a professional need when needed (so far, since vvvv is older it seems it is more common in terms of bussiness).
I agree on the multimedia professional aspect, even by tonight I’m practicing vvvv for work.
Also just a thing which occured to me now, I deal with a lot of ML stuff and after seeing Python is very easy to intergrate to TD that was a big bonus for me. I haven’t seen anything ML related to it yet (maybe didn’t dove enough yet!) but even the mere possibiltiy of being able to write such stuff along with it makes it more intruging.
For example if I would have heard something like this before that would make a nice comparision element :)
QDE. I knew you already had the answer within yourself.
Personally I don’t see anything that pyhton can do that C# (or, with a bit of time, VL) can’t. Also fiddling with VS could bring python in vvvv, if one really must use that module.
Well regarding the C and Python comparision I would rather pick Python by far if the aim is ML. Cool wrapper, thanks for the link - a part of me was expecting a link like this I guess.
well IronHydra didn’t grow out from the proof of concept / experiment phase. Its nicest form would be a nodefactory from .py source files. technically speaking you can implement any language to develop nodes with into vvvv especially scripting languages with its nodefactory interfaces. problem is it’s ridiculously time consuming with only existing implementations showing how to do it and mostly no other docs.
On the python a bit. Looking at language features nothing makes python more suitable for machine learning than C# and vice versa. Python is favored by researchers because
It is a wide spread and intuitive language
Python syntax can be incredibly close to pseudo-code
It has a truly OS/environment/usage agnostic ecosystem with an out of the box package manager (pip) (C# caught up on that since 2014 with .NET Core / Standard ;) )
It has nice interoping with C or C++ libs (although .NET has C++/CLI and PInvoke for that matter)
and therefore makes it a natural choice for researching any sorts of algorithms not just ML. But it has the same illness as any weakly typed language such as javascript (not as bad though) that reflection is cumbersome or have to be done manually and compile time bug proofing is not as efficient as with .NET languages.
I say there’s nothing what you can’t do in TD which you can in vvvv and vice versa. Except TD now comes with trendy problems solved in vanilla out of the box while in vvvv your mom ain’t gonna be there to hold your hands if you want to render in something else than phong-directional.
Without any particular proof, I just get the feeling that TD is more suitable for people that like their stuff readymade and don’t want to get to know the actual concept behind something/their hands dirty …
That’s why I’d probably expect a lot of TD projects to look kinda the same, as if people (particularly students) would just change some girlpower patches a bit and be done with it.
I understand about the issue with languages, I mean Python is a scientific research language anyway, I mean there are C implementations of various ML stuff like conv nets as well but even now it feels like those who with C feels out of the ‘community’.
At the moment it seems the first 3-4 projects will determine the software I’ll continue with, one is like a VR app created in an environment created by lidar scan point-clouds. The other one is a audio-visual setup which integrates quite a lot of stuff from OSC to DMX to various projectors etc. I’m trying to create both of these on both vvvv and TD, lets see how it goes but I’m really happy that you said “I say there’s nothing what you can’t do in TD which you can in vvvv and vice versa”.
