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There are lots of reasons to use TOPs or CHOPs for your data workflows as both families offer fast processing for data, and are well suited for many mathematical operations.
Converting data between TOPs and CHOPs comes in two varieties: we can convert textures to channel data with a TOP to CHOP, and we can convert channels to textures with a CHOP to TOP. While Channel Operators can contain any number of channels, Texture Operators have some limitations we must consider.
When converting data from CHOPs to TOPs, it’s important to note that a Texture Operator can only hold 4 channels of information per pixel it represents (a red, green, blue and alpha channel). When converting between CHOPs and TOPs, we can pack channels into pixels several ways, but we can never pack more than 4 channels into a single pixel.
Converting from DATs to CHOPs is often used to move data from tables into channels. The structure of your table (whether using a header row, or a header column) may impact how you set-up your DAT to CHOP so that it packages data into the correct channels.
There’s been increasing interest in doing data manipulation on the GPU, and for this reason we sometimes convert data into TOPs. Some families don’t have a direct to TOP workflow, so you may find that you need to first convert data to CHOPs before converting to TOPs. For example, if you’d like to convert a SOP’s points to TOP data, you need to first convert this to a CHOP, before converting to a TOP.