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  1. GUIDES

External Agent Control

LOPs can expose your project’s tools to agents running outside of TouchDesigner — code editors, custom MCP clients, automation pipelines, or anything that speaks MCP.

Use MCP Server to host tools that external clients can call into your project.

Use Tool Manager to aggregate multiple LOPs tools and expose the enabled set as a single MCP endpoint.

TouchDesigner Tools Outward
schemasMCP endpointtool calls
tool
LOPs Tools
process
MCP Server
external
External Client
Cursor / Windsurf / custom
data
Live TD Project

Any MCP-compatible client can connect — Cursor, Windsurf, custom scripts, or other agent frameworks.

The reverse direction also works. Use MCP Client to give a LOPs Agent access to tools hosted by external MCP servers.

External Tools Into LOPs
tools/listGetToolresponse
external
MCP Server
tool
MCP Client
agent
Agent
data
TD Project

Configure servers in MCP Config, sync the MCP Client, connect the servers you want, then add the MCP Client to your Agent’s External Op Tools sequence.

Claude Code is a native agent operator — it sits alongside Agent and Voice Agent. It launches a WebSocket server and connects to a local Claude Code CLI session, giving you full parameter control over the Claude Agent SDK from within TouchDesigner. It is not an external control path; it is another way to run an agent directly from your project.

If you want an outside Claude Code session to control your TD project (rather than the other way around), use MCP Server or Tool Manager to expose your tools.

ActivityViz visualizes agent and tool activity in real time — useful when an outside agent is working inside your project and you want to see what it is doing.