Tixl: Open-source realtime motion graphics | Hacker News Reader

Tixl: Open-source realtime motion graphics

github.com

214 pointsnateb202228 comments

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.

Just give it a try, you won't regret it :)

> it has the potential to become the blender for 2D/3D VFX

Looks truly awesome, but having to use the worst possible closed source OS to run it is a downer.

fwiw they're intending to be cross platform, but it's (currently) built on D3D so that porting task will be slow.

DXVK Native could speed up the porting effort.

> (as a hobbyist who likes cooking up some vis for my DJ sets)

I generally get really annoyed when I hear someone say that a particular piece of open-source or free-as-in-beer software “blows After Effects out of the water”[0], but not here: I appreciate you describing your use case so people have the right expectations going in. It sounds like this is more trying to compete with offerings like Touch Designer or Resolume than AE, which feels like a space with much more opportunity for disruption (without having a huge full-time team working for years in obscurity).

[0] I want someone to do to After Effects what Blender is doing to Cinema4D and Maya (provide a competitive free alternative to people who don’t need corporate deals and support plans). Every piece of software that people usually mention falls short in huge ways. I think a lot of people get into this space not realizing how difficult it is just to have a real-time scrubbable timeline that intelligently caches intermediate steps to disk and can render at lower resolutions to save time. So many alternatives absolutely chug once you have 10 1080p tracks with mattes and different effects. And then you’ve got color space transforms and all the different HDR things and a million other features that users of After Effects often forget are features.

As someone who's been looking to get into video creation and motion graphics as a hobby, usually people recommend davinci resolve as an alternative. Which, apart from enshittifying and not being open source, the motion graphics part seems like a bit of an afterthought.

I’ve gotten so frustrated with AE the past couple years that my New Year’s resolution is to bite the bullet and try Resolve for my next couple projects. I’m even willing to splurge for the license if it means I can stop paying Adobe every month. I’m in a place where I definitely need a lot of AE’s pro features and performance, but I’m not locked into the plugin ecosystem, so I have a bit more flexibility than some other people.

Blender itself will grow into the After Effects space. It's doing so very slowly, but very definitely.

I want this to happen, but this past month I tried using Blender’s Video Editor (after hearing the great news about Compositor Modifiers) and boy oh boy does it chug. Apparently Compositor Modifiers only run on the CPU, so trying to apply them to a track of 1080p footage totally locked up my Ryzen 7950X and froze the UI for a few minutes while it tried to render the preview.

I’m hoping GPU Compositor Modifiers aren’t too much of a lift, but at the moment they’re not actively being worked on (and I don’t have the expertise to do it myself) so I’d guess it’s at least about a year before this feature becomes usable for anything beyond really simple compositing with super-crunchy proxies.

Maybe Blender 6.

> I generally get really annoyed when I hear someone say that a particular piece of open-source or free-as-in-beer software “blows After Effects out of the water”[0], but not here

It bothered me because the phrase suggests a favorable comparison to After Effects, when in fact After Effects really isn't the right tool for a job that needs real-time motion graphics. It's like saying Inkscape blows VS Code out of the water, for drawing SVGs.

   I think a lot of people get into this space not realizing how difficult it is just to have a real-time scrubbable timeline that intelligently caches intermediate steps to disk

So… not After Effects :P

Wow — TiXL is on HN! I’m one of the maintainers, and I’m blown away by the feedback and traction our software is getting.

Some quick answers:

Is it an “After Effects” killer? I spent a lot of time with AE and used to teach classes on it. I tried to integrate everything I love into the UX of TiXL and change everything I hated :) So, it depends on what you want to make. TiXL has pretty good keyframing and compositing, and we’re working steadily on improving it. It can probably do a lot, with the benefit that you never have to “render,” and you can combine keyframe animations with procedural animations. But tracking, precise sync with video files, and typography animations are still much better in AE. So, for “traditional” 2D vector motion design, AE is a clear winner. For particle effects, composition, and audio-reactive work, TiXL can be a strong option.

As other posters pointed out, it sits somewhere between After Effects, Fusion, TouchDesigner, Blender (with nodes), and Resolume.

Windows — yikes: I’m totally with you. Windows is going downhill, not just since Microsoft’s obsession with AI and forcing everybody into their cloud. We’re working on making in running natively on Linux and MacOS. With .NET and ImGui, chances are pretty good. But as another poster pointed out, moving from DX11 to Vulkan will be a tremendous effort. It might be doable, though, because the largest API-specific implementations are bundled into a few low-level components.

Anyways! Thanks for featuring our project. If you’re curious, give it a try and join us on Discord. We’re a friendly community doing this thing together — not for profit, but because we really like motion graphics and good interaction design.

Does it work (well) under WINE / Proton?

Having used both After Effects, Apple Motion and a bit of Blender on and off for about 20 years, I really miss a good motion graphics tool that runs well on Linux. Blender could be it, but it is currently not there.

Will definitely check out TiXL when I have some spare time, if it is possible to run under WINE!

Bonus question: How does TiXL compare to Friction? (https://friction.graphics)

I think the parts that run, run surprisingly well. Performance on Wine is incredible. I would argue faster than on Windows.

But there are a bunch of issues related to internal Windows APIs that need to be resolved, esp. related to encoding videos with MS Media Foundation. We're planning to replace that with ffmpeg / libav. But sadly due to GPL and patent issues, bundling an encoder is then even more complex.

Default builds of ffmpeg are lgpl licensed, which shouldn't cause you GPL issues, but could still cause patent issues. Another option is to depend on ffmpeg as an external program communicated with via pipe. You can supply a "safe" ffmpeg and allow users to point to a better ffmpeg. Ultimately though, it seems that using whatever blender supports should be safe from a patent point of view.

The amount of attention and care that went into the user interface is mind-boggling. I love the (in hindsight obvious) trick of having a 2D value picker with the step size as a second dimension. This is notoriously difficult to get right, especially for creative software: sometimes a 0.001 difference changes everything in your scene, other times you need a 1000 step size to see any effect. Not forcing an opinion on "surely this will be enough granularity for everyone" is refreshing.

Thanks for the ton of OSS work that is going into this and keep it up!

I think SideFX was the first to do that with Houdini. It's one of my favourite micro-UX features of high-end graphics software, coming in at a close second to Nuke's use of both linear and non-linear scales for slider values.

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.

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

I’ve heard many European non-native English speakers say “a software”, and I see it as a charming reflection of their native languages, where presumably “software” is a countable noun. I think that’s what’s going on here.

As a Nuke, Fusion, and formerly MagicMusicVisuals user, I am excited to give TiXL a try. Love node based workflows, but find Blender too heavy for most of my needs. I'm surprised I have not run across it yet. Thanks @nateb2022 for sharing it here!

Had never heard of this open source tool despite numerous web searches for over a decade of interest in video creation.

Bad SEO despite being on GitHub?

Edit: I understand why. It only builds/run on Windows

Ok, is VJ the only use case? If it has realtime capabilities then it has other applications right? Can someone please explain other use cases?

It's actually pretty good at creating and rendering linear animation clips and syncing to soundtracks (e.g. music videos). You then can export the animation as mp4 or image sequence.

You can also use "TimeClips" to do non-linear editing.

Another use-case might be small interactive installations or info-systems. It has basic support for fetch REST-apis and parsing data. Other inputs might be sensors like MIDI or OSC.

So this is like an open source alternative to after effects?

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.

https://friction.graphics might be what you are looking for

MS Windows only unfortunately!

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