TouchDesigner: Topography Sandbox
I've been seeing interactive sandboxes around for a while. Mostly used to show topography and the sort. They are pretty cool. So it was time to buy me a kitty litter box at Dollar Tree and a bag of sand from Lowes to try and make my own.
This project was a bit more difficult than I had thought. I ended up going a route where I used the depth information from my Kinect to create a 3D point cloud that was made into a 3D SOP representing the depth with a Ramp TOP as a texture with the color variation.
I started with CutMods method, which was great learning - but not quite right to get to the result I was going for. I do suggest watching his tutorial, it's a great introduction to pointclouds in 3D space.
I ended up using this method by user Jacob M on the Touch forum (such a great resource). he uses chop channels to convert information into a 3D plane. I added a little lag to smooth it out (though I'd like to figure out how to smooth it better).
Then I created a Ramp with different colors to texture the material, but had to use a Texture SOP to turn the texture in 3D space to rise up the Z axis. You know what, I'll shut up now. All this information is in notes within the TouchDesigner project linked below.
