On October 29, The NODE Institute met at NLND (Neuland) Berlin for the 38th edition of TouchDesigner Roundtable Berlin. NLND, an innovation district inside Neukölln’s former Philip Morris factory, hosted the evening in its Kino. Before the doors opened at 18:30, NLND led a tour of the campus.
Graeme du Plessis, Brand Director of NLND, could not attend. Hannah Robinson introduced NLND instead, and Marcel Bückner of Xenorama Collective gave a spontaneous introduction to Nebula in Beelitz-Heilstätten, the location of the next TouchDesigner Roundtable on December 3. Lukas Treibenreif (OBJ.Studio), Sophie Holder and Greg Hermanovic of Derivative followed with their talks. At the start of Greg’s session, Dan Molnar introduced TDXCollab together with Greg.
We had technical difficulties at the start of the evening, so the recording above begins in Marcel Bückner’s talk. Thank you to everyone who came to NLND, to our speakers and to the crew who made the night run.
19:00 UHR / 7:00 PM /
HANNAH ROBINSON (NLND) AND MARCEL BÜCKNER (XENORAMA COLLECTIVE)
Graeme du Plessis, Brand Director of NLND, could not attend the evening. Hannah Robinson of NLND stepped in and introduced NLND.
Marcel Bückner of Xenorama Collective then gave a spontaneous introduction to Nebula in Beelitz-Heilstätten, the location of TouchDesigner Roundtable XXXIX on December 3. Nebula is the name of the space, Xenorama the name of Marcel’s collective. The ground floor has a domed hall surrounded by six chambers, a walk-through environment for themed exhibitions. The upper floor has an immersive space with ten projectors for 360-degree and dome projection, a bar and a planned future lab. The rooms are renovated, with network, power and mounting points throughout. The current exhibition opened about a month ago and keeps changing, because the collective wants to develop exhibitions and projects on site with freelancers and other creatives. Marcel invited everyone with ideas to talk to him. Nebula is about 35 to 40 minutes from Berlin by regional train and is open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
20:00 UHR / 8:00 PM /
LUKAS TREIBENREIF (OBJ.STUDIO)
Lukas Treibenreif is an experience designer, multimedia artist and partner at OBJ.Studio, an interdisciplinary studio based in Berlin and Hamburg that builds immersive spatial experiences and multimedia installations. OBJ.Studio also made two site-specific light installations for NLND’s Ecosystem Launch, so the Roundtable was something of a homecoming.
In his session, Lukas gave insight into finished installations and projects, looking at the concepts, the compromises and what happens between the first idea and the physical experience. He started from one question, what it takes to craft genuine emotions, and answered that a physical experience reaches all senses at once. For the NLND Ecosystem Launch, the team lit the transition hall with planes of laser light that guests walked through, and hung a prism of mirror foil above the main hall. The foil came out wrinkled, which scattered extra light rays across the room, so they kept it. Neither installation ran on TouchDesigner, but the prism grew out of an earlier research project built in it. His second project was an exhibition with Kia: the team drove an EV9 into the woods, powered scanners and laptops from its battery, scanned wood, sand and roots, processed the point clouds in TouchDesigner and turned them into resin sculptures. In January 2024 it became a gallery show in Frankfurt, powered by the car, with a laser installation linking a tree outside to the room. In the Q&A he said that clients trust open-ended R&D when the process is not a black box.
obj.studio
instagram.com/_benreif
21:00 UHR / 9:00 PM / SOPHIE HOLDER
Sophie Holder is a Berlin-based visual artist who works with generative systems and sculptural 3D forms, building sound-reactive, biomechanical visual systems that she mixes in real time. In her session she shared her process, from sculpting in ZBrush and rendering in Cinema 4D to a live setup of TouchDesigner running through Resolume. She traced her path from a first visit to the Modem festival in Croatia four years ago to the visual effects programme at Catalyst in Berlin, and showed her sculpts, her Resolume layout and a Leap Motion patch that lets her play visuals with her hand. Since POPs, she can render her ZBrush sculptures in TouchDesigner in real time instead of waiting five hours for one loop. Her exhibition piece Cycles set looped renders against a live TouchDesigner stream: stuck in our own loops, life keeps running in real time. In the Q&A she said she wants to move from psychedelic festivals towards more professional settings, and to bring her creatures out of the screen as 3D prints.
22:00 UHR / 10:00 PM /
GREG HERMANOVIC (DERIVATIVE)
Greg Hermanovic is president and CTO of Derivative, the company behind TouchDesigner, and one of its founders. He co-founded Side Effects Software, the makers of Houdini, in 1987 and spun off Derivative in 2000.
At the start of the session, Dan Molnar introduced TDXCollab together with Greg: native real-time collaboration for TouchDesigner, currently in beta. Dan and Greg worked in the same TouchDesigner project live, each seeing the other’s cursor in the network, and a guest from the audience and Nelson of The Touch Lab, joining from Switzerland, edited it with them. Dan built TDXCollab with Nelson. It is end-to-end encrypted and free on a local network, and a relay for working over the internet will probably be a paid option. The beta can be requested at collab.functionstore.tools.
Greg then gave an update on what has landed in TouchDesigner 2025 over the past months and what is coming: native Gaussian splats, glTF import and export, the Script POP, the new .pop file format, DMX fixtures built from POPs with GDTF and MVR support, the official MCP component for AI assistants, and new POPs such as Text, Delaunay Triangulation and Color Mix. He also looked back at the roots of the software, from the first pixel he drew on a research ship in the Atlantic to Houdini at SideFX and early interfaces of the late 1990s and 2005. In the Q&A he said he wants AI assistance to remove mechanical steps while the artist stays in control and understands the network, that a Linux port is high on the list but not started, and that Derivative grew from 2000 to 2026 with 23 people and without outside investors.
derivative.ca
instagram.com/touchdesigner
Thank you
To Claudia Montesi for documenting the night, to Lynn Mayya, Phelan Kane, Amin Shahsavar and Sofia Fantuzzi for making the Kino work on the night, to Hannah Robinson and the whole NLND team for hosting us, and to Marcel, Lukas, Sophie, Greg and Dan for their talks. See you at TouchDesigner Roundtable XXXIX on December 3 at Nebula in Beelitz-Heilstätten.
The TD Roundtable XXXVIII WAS supported by:
Derivative / derivative.ca
NLND / nlnd.com
The TD Roundtable XXXVIII WAS MEETING AT:
NLND (Neuland) Berlin
Neuköllnische Allee 80
12057 Berlin
Germany