Tixl: Open-source realtime motion graphics

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 :)

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.

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!

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?

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.

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