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 :)
Looks truly awesome, but having to use the worst possible closed source OS to run it is a downer.
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.
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
Thanks for the ton of OSS work that is going into this and keep it up!
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.
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)
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.
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.
Bad SEO despite being on GitHub?
Edit: I understand why. It only builds/run on Windows
lol768•1mo ago
- "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•1mo ago
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•1mo ago