PluginBuilder V2

PluginBuilder is a development tool for building, hot-reloading and installing C++ custom operators (CHOP / TOP / DAT / SOP / POP) for TouchDesigner, from inside TouchDesigner. It drives CMake + Ninja through a persistent MSVC environment, recompiles on every source save (usually well under a second), swaps the new DLL into the running .toe without an unload gap, mirrors the plugin's custom parameters (pages preserved) onto the PluginBuilder COMP, and reports build results (status, timings, parsed compiler errors) on the COMP itself.

V2 compiles against the C++ API 10 headers shipped with TouchDesigner 2025.30000+ (include/, synced from the installed Samples/CPlusPlus by dev/sync_templates.py) and warns when the running TouchDesigner ships a different SDK version.

Requirements

• TouchDesigner 2025.30000 or newer (commercial / pro / educational license — CPlusPlus operators).
• Visual Studio 2022 or 2026 with the Desktop development with C++ workload (found automatically via vswhere).
• CMake ≥ 3.21 and Ninja — the copies bundled with Visual Studio's C++ CMake tools component are found automatically; otherwise put them on PATH or set the paths in settings.ini.
• Windows x64. (Optional) CUDA Toolkit 12.x for the CUDA templates.

Installation

1. Clone / download PluginBuilder_V2.
2. Open SetSettings.toe, set PluginBuilderDir in the settings DAT (everything else is optional — see dev/settings_template.ini) and run it. settings.ini is written to %APPDATA%/IntentDev/PluginBuilder/.
3. (Optional) python dev/sync_templates.py to resync include/ and templates/ from a different TouchDesigner build.

Usage

1. Drag PluginBuilder.tox into a TouchDesigner project saved on disk.
2. Enter a Plugin Name (letters, digits, _; it becomes the CMake target, class name and DLL name — the TouchDesigner opType is derived and validated automatically, e.g. FFT → Fft, with a collision check against built-in operators).
3. Pick a Plugin Template (BasicCHOP, CHOPWithPythonClass, BasicDAT, CPUMemoryTOP, CudaTOP, SimpleShapesSOP, SimpleShapesPOP, CudaPOP — discovered from templates/*/template.json).
4. Create Plugin generates
   • PluginProjects/<Name>/CMakeLists.txt (15 lines; includes cmake/TDPlugin.cmake), plugin.json, CMakePresets.json, launch.vs.json, .vscode/ (attach-to-TouchDesigner + IntelliSense via compile_commands.json) and source/ from the template,
   • __Plugins__/<Name>/ for the deployed DLL(s),
   • the loader chain (in1 → plugin_loader → out1) inside the COMP, and starts the first configure + build.
5. Edit the sources. With Compile On Update on, every save triggers a Ninja build; when it succeeds and the DLL actually changed (hash-gated), the DLL and any runtime DLLs are swapped in with the rename-in-place trick and the loader re-inits. Custom parameters are mirrored onto the COMP with their original pages and BIND expressions.
6. Status page: Build Status, Last Build, Loaded DLL, Cancel Build, Clean Build Dir, Force Reload Plugin, Run Tests (ctest). Compiler diagnostics are parsed into builder/build_errors (severity, file, line, code, message) and the first error is shown as a COMP error.
7. Install Plugin copies __Plugins__/<Name>/ to Documents/Derivative/Plugins/<Name>/.

Type the name of an existing PluginProjects/<Name> to reopen it (the manifest tells PluginBuilder the family).

Extending a project's CMake

td_add_plugin(MyPlugin FAMILY CHOP)
td_plugin_use_fftw3(MyPlugin)              # vendored 3rdParty/fftw3 (plugin, PluginBuilder or TD samples tree)
td_plugin_use_opencv(MyPlugin)             # vendored OpenCV
td_plugin_use_python(MyPlugin)             # embedded CPython headers / import lib
td_plugin_optimize(MyPlugin AVX2 FAST_MATH LTO)
td_plugin_add_runtime_dll(MyPlugin "${SOME_DLL}")
td_plugin_add_test(MyPlugin my_tests SOURCES tests/main.cpp)   # headless ctest target
td_plugin_add_bench(MyPlugin my_bench SOURCES bench/main.cpp)

See cmake/TDPlugin.cmake for the full list and the TD_PLUGIN_WARNINGS / TD_PLUGIN_ASAN options.

Visual Studio / VS Code

• Visual Studio: open the project folder as a CMake project; launch.vs.json launches TouchDesigner with the .toe under the debugger (turn Compile On Update off first so VS owns the build).
• VS Code: .vscode/launch.json has Attach to running TouchDesigner (the hot-reload-friendly way) and Launch TouchDesigner; IntelliSense uses build/compile_commands.json.

Development

python -m unittest discover -s tests -v      # 23 headless tests for source/PluginBuilderCore.py
python dev/ci.py --all                       # + scaffold every template and build the non-CUDA ones
python dev/ci.py --project ../Plugin_FFT/PluginProjects/FFT
python dev/sync_templates.py                 # resync SDK headers + templates from the installed TouchDesigner

source/PluginBuilderCore.py holds all TouchDesigner-independent logic (naming, settings, toolchain discovery, templates, manifests, diagnostics parsing, the build runner, hot-swap file replacement); source/PluginBuilderExt.py is the thin TouchDesigner adapter. The extension loads both from disk under PluginBuilderDir/source, so the .tox always runs the current code. dev/deploy.py (run inside dev/dev.toe) re-exports PluginBuilder.tox.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — please run python dev/ci.py --all before opening one.