Oh hey, Tixl on HN! It's probably my favorite piece of FOSS creative software, and honestly blows After Effects out of the water for me (as a hobbyist who likes cooking up some vis for my DJ sets).
I'm not kidding when I say it has the potential to become the blender for 2D/3D VFX -- the node engine is super powerful, the primitive building blocks are all well thought-out and integrate with each other very nicely, the performance characteristics are amazing (all optimized for realtime!), and there's a ton of I/O for everything from mouse input to OSC/MIDI, camera control, elaborate audio reaction... and also just plain TCP/UDP/HTTP/Websockets! It's such a powerful glue piece, but also tons of fun to mess around with on its own.
The best part? You can create your own components, define your inputs/outputs, and compose them together. The even bestest part? You can dig into the predefined components/effects and see how they work, as they're very often implemented in the same way! The visual editor all drills down to C# in the end, and you can drop into the code or write some HLSL shaders if you want, all with hot reloading.
This looks very cool, some immediate thoughts though:
- "TiXL is an open source software to create realtime motion graphics" - pedantry, but software is an uncountable noun. You cannot have a software.
- It wasn't immediately clear to me from the homepage that it's Windows-only. Appreciate it appears to behave under WINE, but it'd be good to make clearer.
The animation on their website looks nice, I'm curious to try it. But that's a good point about needing WINE wrapper on Linux and Mac. Apparently they're working on a native port.
After effects is usually used for compositing and also supports some vfx, but isn't meant for realtime use. This would be similar to vvvv or touchdesigner, used for audio reactive visuals (VJing), interactive art exhibits, etc.
I'm not kidding when I say it has the potential to become the blender for 2D/3D VFX -- the node engine is super powerful, the primitive building blocks are all well thought-out and integrate with each other very nicely, the performance characteristics are amazing (all optimized for realtime!), and there's a ton of I/O for everything from mouse input to OSC/MIDI, camera control, elaborate audio reaction... and also just plain TCP/UDP/HTTP/Websockets! It's such a powerful glue piece, but also tons of fun to mess around with on its own.
The best part? You can create your own components, define your inputs/outputs, and compose them together. The even bestest part? You can dig into the predefined components/effects and see how they work, as they're very often implemented in the same way! The visual editor all drills down to C# in the end, and you can drop into the code or write some HLSL shaders if you want, all with hot reloading.
Just give it a try, you won't regret it :)
- "TiXL is an open source software to create realtime motion graphics" - pedantry, but software is an uncountable noun. You cannot have a software.
- It wasn't immediately clear to me from the homepage that it's Windows-only. Appreciate it appears to behave under WINE, but it'd be good to make clearer.
Installation: Non-Windows systems - https://github.com/tixl3d/tixl/wiki/help.Installation
Linux Support - https://github.com/tixl3d/tixl/issues/77
Mac - https://github.com/tixl3d/tixl/issues/32