[HN Gopher] Tixl: Open-source realtime motion graphics
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Tixl: Open-source realtime motion graphics
Author : nateb2022
Score : 171 points
Date : 2025-12-26 18:20 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| lol768 wrote:
| 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.
| lioeters wrote:
| 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
| shwaj wrote:
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| So this is like an open source alternative to after effects?
| redrobein wrote:
| 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.
| mathnode wrote:
| https://friction.graphics might be what you are looking for
| apt-get wrote:
| 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 :)
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> 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.
| lucideer wrote:
| fwiw they're intending to be cross platform, but it's
| (currently) built on D3D so that porting task will be slow.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| DXVK Native could speed up the porting effort.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > (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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| 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.
| Uehreka wrote:
| 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.
| fidotron wrote:
| Blender itself will grow into the After Effects space. It's
| doing so very slowly, but very definitely.
| Uehreka wrote:
| 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.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| > 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.
| ttoinou wrote:
| 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
| Zopieux wrote:
| 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!
| shrinks99 wrote:
| 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.
| pixtur wrote:
| 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.
| rsolva wrote:
| 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)
| pixtur wrote:
| 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.
| jdboyd wrote:
| 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.
| androiddrew wrote:
| 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?
| pixtur wrote:
| 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.
| smcleod wrote:
| MS Windows only unfortunately!
| hirako2000 wrote:
| 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
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