Glyph Weave guide

Overview

Glyph Weave cuts a moving field of noise into shapes that stand in tiers, and weaves every layer from cells and marks.

Orange and cream tops on tall dark red walls, standing on black
The Fire preset at 16:9: tops and walls of a noise field standing twenty-two cells tall, with no ground under them.

Underneath is a noise field: one smooth random value for every cell of a grid, drifting on the loop. Nothing is drawn from a camera or a picture.

A level cut keeps the cells whose value falls inside a band. What is kept becomes the shapes; up to four tiers are cut from the same field, each standing higher than the one below.

Every shape stands up by oblique extrusion: it is repeated cell by cell toward one of eight directions, and those walls are drawn in two layers, near and far.

Each layer then fills its own cells with a cell lattice and a cell mark: rows, diagonals, checks, bricks or dots, and inside each lit cell a square, a dot, a stroke, a cross or a ring.

Type a word and its letters join the matter as a signed distance field: raised over the field, cut as letters, or carved out of a stepped plate.

Time is a frame clock: a frame number, not a clock reading, so every loop closes exactly and a PNG, a GIF, a zip of frames or an MP4 repeats without a seam. It runs on your graphics card with WebGL2, and nothing leaves your machine.

Open Glyph Weave Start here

In this guide

  1. StartWhat you need and your first picture in four steps.
  2. Every controlEvery control in the panel, one line each.
  3. Three looksThree pictures and the settings that made them.
  4. Keep your workThe PNG, the GIF, the MP4 and the zip of frames.
  5. KeysEvery shortcut, and what each one does.
  6. HelpWhat to do when something goes wrong.