TouchDesigner can serve as a real-time rendering and previz layer in a Houdini production pipeline, handling high-resolution output with shorter turnaround than offline rendering

Ronen Tanchum’s talk positions TouchDesigner not just as a live-performance tool but as a 3D production package for high-end 360-degree content, taking roles traditionally held by offline renderers: previz, on-set visualisation, 3D layout, shading, and rendering. Houdini simulations and 3D scenes export via FBX or Alembic into TD for real-time rendering at high resolutions. The advantage: render-on-demand rather than pre-rendering, saving disk space and turnaround time. The approach suits projects without full 3D budgets but needing photorealistic outputs, managed as executable task lists for small teams.

Examples

A 360-video project: Houdini simulates cloth dynamics, exports Alembic to TD, which renders equirectangular at 8K in real time. Previz for a dome show rendered interactively in TD during production meetings.

Assessment

Design a minimal Houdini-to-TouchDesigner pipeline for a particle simulation destined for a dome projection. Specify export format, the TD node chain to ingest and render it, and one advantage over pre-rendering the same simulation offline.