Free TouchDesigner 2025.31550+ Component: Spherical Harmonics Lighting Toolkit with POPs (exsstas)

Overview

Stanislav Glazov (exsstas) shares a real-time diffuse lighting toolkit for TouchDesigner based on L2 spherical harmonics, which stores incoming light as 27 numbers per probe in a 3D world-space grid. Components encode HDR environment maps, spherical and line lights and procedural light fields into the grid, modify and analyze it, convert probe POP attributes into 3D textures and shade geometry with Phong, normal-mapped Phong or PBR materials using the SH diffuse term.

The same light field can also drive particle behaviors, and project_file_from_tutorial.toe contains the examples and full scene from the accompanying YouTube videos. It requires TouchDesigner 2025.31550 with POPs or newer, is licensed CC BY 4.0 and is a free direct download from GitHub.