VFX Texture Lab is an open-source, node-based procedural authoring application for real-time VFX textures, animated flipbooks, reusable PBR materials and lightweight procedural geometry.
It is designed for artists who want the flexibility of a procedural graph without forcing a conventional material-only workflow. The same project can generate masks, noises, distortions, normal and height data, animated effects, complete texture sets and the mesh used to preview or export them.
VFX Texture Lab is in active public-beta development. Automated Windows x64 builds are published through GitHub Releases; Linux and contributor workflows remain source-based for now. Graph behaviour may still change while major systems are being established.
VFX Texture Lab is aimed at effects such as:
- Fire, smoke, clouds, energy, magical effects and dissolves
- Distortion, flow maps, scrolling masks and animated gradients
- Flipbook sheets and loopable procedural animation
- Terrain, erosion, surface analysis and scan cleanup
- Reusable PBR material graphs and channel-packed texture sets
- VFX cards, ribbons, rings, beams, imported OBJ meshes and simple procedural geometry
- Portable graph assets that can be shared or reused as ordinary nodes
The application is not intended to replace a full polygon modeller or DCC. Its geometry workflow focuses on procedural meshes that are useful for VFX construction, preview and export alongside the generated textures.
- Strongly typed Greyscale, Colour, Vector/Normal, Material, Math/Signal and Geometry connections
- GPU-accelerated WGSL evaluation with CPU reference paths for supported nodes
- Noise, shape, blend, adjustment, transform, distortion, blur, flood-fill, distance and terrain families
- Surface-analysis tools including curvature, ambient occlusion, high-pass filtering and histogram selection
- Normal/height processing, scan preparation and tile-making workflows
- 8-bit and 16-bit output handling with higher-precision internal processing
- Reusable PBR Material data carrying Base Colour, Emissive, Normal, Height, Roughness, Metallic, AO and related settings
- Material Blend, Override, Switch and channel breakout/composition workflows
- HDR environment lighting, displacement, bloom, shadows, debug views and multiple preview meshes
- Optional procedural Geometry input so a material can be previewed on the mesh produced by the graph
- Responsive animated material playback with incremental texture uploads and persistent GPU resources
Geometry uses a dedicated typed graph value. It can be generated procedurally, imported from Wavefront OBJ, previewed with graph materials and exported as indexed, UV-mapped OBJ data.
Geometry sources include Mesh Input for linked or embedded Wavefront OBJ files, plus these procedural generators:
- Plane
- Box
- Cylinder, cone and frustum
- Disc, ring and partial arc
- Tapered VFX ribbon
Current operations include:
- Transform and Combine
- Delete Small Parts for automated scan-fragment cleanup
- Voxel Remesh
- Native percentage-based Decimate with topology protection
- Subdivide and Un-Subdivide
- Displace from a greyscale heightmap
- Rebuild smooth, angle-limited or flat normals
- Bend and Twist
- UV Transform and manual Automatic Charts UV Unwrap
- High-to-low Albedo, tangent Normal, signed Height and AO baking
- Clean and Weld
Generated meshes support artist-controlled pivots, XYZ rotation, UV tiling and focused 3D/UV inspection. Dense static branches and their vertex/index buffers remain cached across unrelated Material changes. High-poly import, simplification, remeshing, unwrapping and baking use cancellable background work with progress feedback and detailed diagnostics.
- Timeline playback with frame, seconds, normalised time, delta time and loop-phase signals
- Exposable animated parameters and curve-driven control
- Loop-aware procedural noise evolution
- Flipbook Generator and Decode workflows
- Stateful nodes including temporal blending, frame delay and reaction diffusion
- Bounded checkpoints, deterministic invalidation and playback-aware preview scheduling
- Searchable node library and keyboard-driven node creation
- Typed reroutes, wire cutting, direct insertion and alignment/distribution tools
- Nested docking for compact graph organisation
- Named Send/Receive portals for long-distance connections
- Graph Input and Graph Output nodes for turning a complete graph into a reusable node
- Multi-document Graph Explorer with linked or embedded graph instances
- Graph-owned image and mesh resources with virtual folders, shared relinking, embedding, restoration and missing-source status
- Optional node thumbnails and graph-asset thumbnails
- Self-contained graph export, dependency recovery and missing-resource reporting
- Dockable 2D Preview, 3D Preview and Canvas Editor
- Fit, tile and 1:1 pixel inspection in the 2D Preview
- Pixel-exact and antialiased rasterisation paths where appropriate
- Dedicated drawing history for Canvas Editor content
- Contextual Inspector with evaluation timing, backend, cache and memory information
- Saved workspace layouts and application themes
- PNG, TGA and raw R16 image output
- Quick Export and reusable multi-file texture-set templates
- Channel packing and built-in engine-oriented presets
- Multi-target export profiles with shared graph evaluation
- Wavefront OBJ geometry export with UV and normal controls
- Shareable
.vfxexportexport-template files - Portable self-contained
.vfxgraphfiles - Validated installable
.vfxpackagearchives with optional source images, OBJ meshes, thumbnails and dependencies
- Create or import source textures, OBJ meshes, noises, masks and signals.
- Build procedural image branches and preview any intermediate output directly.
- Assemble channels into a Material and inspect it in the 3D Preview.
- Generate or process Geometry when the effect needs a custom card, ring, ribbon, displaced mesh or cleaned photogrammetry asset.
- For scans, clean/remesh/decimate a low mesh, unwrap it and bake Albedo, Normal, Height and AO from the original high mesh.
- Animate parameters with Time, Loop Phase or curves and test playback on the final material.
- Export individual textures, a complete texture set, a flipbook, an OBJ mesh or a portable graph package.
Because every major output is typed, texture, material, signal and mesh branches remain visually distinct and cannot be connected accidentally without an appropriate conversion or composition node.
VFX Texture Lab is built around interactive graph editing rather than full-graph recomputation:
- Compatible image operations run through WebGPU compute shaders.
- GPU textures remain resident and unchanged branches reuse cached results.
- Compatible linear adjustment chains can be fused into one GPU pass.
- Material playback updates only channels that changed.
- Static procedural meshes persist independently from Material edits.
- Dense mesh vertex and index buffers remain resident in the 3D renderer.
- Preview work is coalesced so obsolete intermediate frames do not build a backlog.
- CPU implementations remain available for tests, fallbacks and operations that do not yet have GPU kernels.
The Inspector and GPU/Renderer Diagnostics expose timing and cache information when a graph needs investigation.
| Format | Purpose |
|---|---|
.vfxgraph |
Editable graph document or reusable graph asset |
.vfxpackage |
Validated installable graph package with dependencies and metadata |
.vfxexport |
Shareable texture-set export template |
.vfxnodepkg |
Installable custom node package |
.obj |
Imported or exported mesh geometry |
.png, .tga, .r16 |
Exported texture data |
Graph assets can be linked for live library updates or embedded for portability. Imported images and meshes are graph-owned resources that may remain linked or be embedded for recovery and sharing. Self-contained export recursively embeds reachable graph instances, image sources and OBJ mesh sources required to reproduce the result.
Download either the Windows x64 Setup installer or Windows x64 Portable ZIP from the GitHub Releases page. The installer does not require Python, creates normal Start Menu/uninstall entries, and associates VFX Texture Lab project/package formats with the application.
The first public builds are unsigned, so Microsoft Defender SmartScreen may ask for confirmation before launch. Verify that the file came from this repository's official Releases page and use the published SHA-256 file when needed.
Source testing remains available on Windows and Linux for contributors. On Windows, use 64-bit Python 3.11-3.13. On Linux, any 64-bit Python 3.11 or newer can bootstrap setup; when the system Python is 3.14+, setup.sh automatically creates a private managed Python 3.13 environment so native xatlas, Embree, SciPy and scikit-image wheels install without local compilation. Extract or clone the complete repository, then run setup.bat / run.bat on Windows or:
bash setup.sh
./run.shThe setup scripts create a private .venv inside the project folder. Do not copy that environment between operating systems or unrelated Python versions.
A reasonably current graphics driver is recommended. GPU rendering and compute use WebGPU through wgpu-py; exact feature availability depends on the graphics adapter and driver.
Detailed subsystem documentation is available in docs/, including:
ARCHITECTURE.md3D_PREVIEW.mdMATERIALS.mdGEOMETRY_FOUNDATION.mdGEOMETRY_TOOLKIT.mdGEOMETRY_SHAPING.mdGEOMETRY_BAKING.mdGRAPH_ASSETS.mdMESH_INPUT_AND_RESOURCES.mdEXPORTING.mdSIMULATIONS.mdWINDOWS_RELEASES.mdTESTING_0.53.0.md
Release notes are maintained exclusively in CHANGELOG.md.
The project is in public beta. Windows x64 binaries are built automatically by GitHub Actions, while source testing remains available on Windows and Linux. Bug reports are most useful when they include:
- The application version
- Operating system and graphics hardware
- A minimal
.vfxgraphreproducer when possible - The complete terminal or Command Prompt output for startup or GPU failures
- A screenshot or short capture for visual and playback issues
VFX Texture Lab is released under the MIT License. Native and Python dependency notices are recorded in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.