Tips
Practical advice for blending, displacement, performance, audio, MIDI, shaders, and live work.
Short, practical notes. Each one stands on its own — read the ones that match what you are building.
Building a look
Blending — Put a Voronoi under an FBM in a Blend node and set the top input to Multiply for textured cells. Screen brightens, Subtract gives hard contrast.
Displacement maps — FBM and Ridge with a high Octaves count make natural height maps. Feed one into Displace, or into a 3D material's height slot.
Post FX order matters — Colour first, then Edge Detect, gives coloured outlines on black. Bloom followed by Chromatic Aberration gives a neon glow.
Gradients — Stepped interpolation gives hard colour bands instead of a smooth ramp. Spiral projection maps colour around a vortex. Radial or Diamond with Mirror on gives a symmetrical bullseye.
3D Voronoi — Color Ratio sets how many cells get full colour and how many stay grey. Wire Thickness outlines the cells. Pattern Mix blends a wired texture into them.
Wang Tiles — Balance Trace Width against Pad Size. Dot Speed animates data running along the traces.
Ryoji — The defaults are the clean look. Raise Split Probability for more detail, and set a Highlight Color to pick out accent cells.
Animation
Drifting patterns — Animate Scale and Offset from the per-parameter animation bar. Give two generators different speeds and the combined motion stops looking mechanical.
Audio reactive — Bass to Scale and highs to Rotation is the classic music-visualiser pairing. A Fall of 0.7 or higher smooths the response; a Gain below 1.0 keeps it subtle.
MIDI — Faders on operator Opacity give you a live mixer. Knobs on Scale and Offset let you sculpt a texture by hand. Set the clamp brackets before you learn a control so the knob sweeps only the useful range.
Performance
A still patch is nearly free. Operators re-use their last frame when nothing feeding them has changed, so a patch sitting idle costs very little. Frame rate problems almost always come from something that is genuinely moving every frame.
Find the expensive node — Bypass nodes one at a time and watch the frame rate. High Octaves counts, large particle counts, and full-resolution 3D are the usual culprits.
Work small, render big — Drop the viewport preview to Half or Quarter while you build. It changes only what you see, never what the Output node sends.
Render Scale on the Output node runs the 3D pipeline at reduced size and upscales it, which buys frame rate on a heavy 3D scene.
Turn previews off on a big graph — Node previews cost real time to draw. With them off, each card keeps a still of its last frame, so you can still read the graph.
Shaders and live sources
Custom shaders — Start by editing the default shader to learn the uniform interface. Shadertoy-style shaders paste in directly and the editor converts them. See Custom GLSL Shaders.
Webcam — Composite a Webcam node with a noise generator using Multiply or Screen. Edge Detect on the camera feed gives a stylised, drawn look.
Sending to other software — Turn on Spout (Windows) or NDI on the Output node and the frame appears as a live source in your VJ, streaming, or projection software. Pair it with MIDI mapping for a full performance rig. See Spout / Syphon Output.