FX engine guide

Overview

FX engine redraws a picture through one of 15 effects, live, as you move the sliders.

Coloured circles and the word AIKIZI redrawn as a grid of round dots in turquoise, coral, violet and amber on black
Dots with a 12-pixel grid on black, with stronger colour and lighter middle tones.

Each effect is a small fragment shader: a program the GPU runs once for every pixel, on every frame. The sliders are its uniforms, so a change shows at once.

Halftone, the first effect, rebuilds the picture from a grid of dots whose size follows how dark each spot is, the way newspapers print photos.

The other 14 turn it into ASCII, dithering, matrix rain, dots, contour lines, sorted pixels, blocks, a two-colour threshold, edges, crosshatch, wave lines, a drifting noise field, Voronoi cells or worn VHS tape.

Under every effect sit the same adjustments, colour modes and finishing touches, such as vignette and grain. One effect shows at a time. You can save a PNG or a JPEG, or copy the result.

Open FX engine Start here

In this guide

  1. StartWhat you need, your first effect, and a first save.
  2. Every controlAll 15 effects and every control, one line each.
  3. Three looksThree pictures and the settings that made them.
  4. Keep your workPNG, JPEG and Copy, and the size you get.
  5. HelpWhat to do when something goes wrong.

It runs in your browser with WebGL 2. Nothing is uploaded. A mouse, a trackpad and a finger all work; every control is in the panel.