🎨 Making visuals

Shader chats

Each shader chat lets you edit graphics card shader code in real time, either by typing natural language commands in the chat or by hand in the code window. By default you start with a rainbow shader.

If the camera is enabled you can mix it in as the foreground and see face, hand and body tracking skeletons. Use as many or as few of these features as you like.

Asking well

Be as specific as possible when you write to the chat. Start from the starter prompts and add a few sentences of your own for 2D, 3D and other kinds of graphics.

Ideas to try

  • Ask for knobs, or for another color control
  • Ask for specific 2D or 3D SDF geometry
  • Ask for looser, more stylistic things, such as a range of flower-inspired color palettes to choose from
  • Ask for screen-space effects: 100 old-school glitch effects to choose from individually, make the camera look like a comic book, or add a fractal mirror to the camera
  • Try loose thematic directions for unpredictable effects

Managing the conversation

  • Delete bubbles to remove part of the history
  • Cancel a request, or queue several commands
  • Errors are submitted automatically

Knobs, locks and random

Any patch can have knobs, and you can ask the chat to add more. The dice randomizes all the parameters; lock a value to keep it unaffected. Knobs can be controlled over MIDI, and they work even better with our first-party controller Mezzz.

When Mezzz is connected, the on-screen UI matches the controller's layout and the pages follow page changes on the device.

Camera and body tracking

Turn on the camera to mix it into a visual, and the microphone to react to sound. Tracking needs the camera.

Ideas to try

  • Make a flower follow your face
  • Give me a mask
  • Make my hand skeleton look like it has a glowing glove

Files and background segmentation

Attach files to a chat from the Library panel, or drag them onto a conversation. We provide a library of video sample packs that we have made with artists over the years: try dropping those onto the chat and asking to use them as part of the background segment, as extra elements, or as textures for 3D objects.

Ideas to try

  • Put this video in the background segment of the visual
  • Put this on the surface of the cube in my scene in a few ways and give me a control over the selection

Linking music

Use the music pill to link a track to a shader. You can also use bytebeats: their variables appear as knobs. The music is included when you post.

Posting and forking

  • Rename a conversation
  • Update state to save where you are, and pull state to bring it back
  • Fork to make variations
  • Delete the conversation

Recordings you make on the site are saved locally and also automatically saved to the cloud, so you can easily create a shareable link. Share the link to a patch directly and your fans can interact with it and render it without compression artifacts, and even tweak every parameter on their devices.