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.
> (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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Looks truly awesome, but having to use the worst possible closed source OS to run it is a downer.
- "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