Interactive Shader Format (ISF) code for working with Metal and rendering on macOS, plus an underlying Metal framework that powers live visual app VDMX6, are now free and open source. That’s great news even if you’re just toying around with shaders or working with visuals, as it opens up lots of possibilities to come in effects, filters, and generative rendering.
ISF, created by Vidvox, is already widely supported. In addition to Vidvox’s own beloved visual tool VDMX, ISF is in CoGe, EboSuite, MadMapper, Apple Motion and Final Cut Pro (via ISF for Motion), Smode, Videosync, and more.
If you’ve got no idea what it’s about, before diving into Vidvox’s article, you should absolutely first go play with the free online editor. That allows non-coders to learn, too, via the time-honored practice of Randomly Changing Numbers. (Seriously, it’s more fun than these hyped-up AI assistants and is in fact a big part of how you learn shader coding! Don’t let a chatbot have all the fun; get your hands dirty and break s***!)
For instance, here’s the one in the screenshot at top:
ISF video editor: InnerDimensionalMatrix [sounds like something at Lumon Industries, is a bunch of geometry flying at you…)
Apparently no one watched this tutorial, which is funny – this excites me, and I’m off to try it out!
But, wait, if the whole point of this is being open and platform agnostic, why are we excited about a proprietary, Apple-specific framework? Well, the beauty of this is that the C++ library underneath is cross-platform, but the Mac frameworks – ISFMSLKit and VVMetalKit – let you easily optimize for macOS and Metal, for free. There is also a lot of work being done on converting shaders between formats via The Khronos Group.
The rest is really only of interest to more advanced developers. But this also has implications for artists, end users, and casual developers – you know, the kind who know just enough to be dangerous. (Raises hand.) Maybe an apt metaphor here is, are you studying to be a lawyer, or are you a poet? Someone else may handle the mechanics of the language, but you’re free to mess around with it for expressive purposes.
And you don’t have to touch the code to get into this – the availability of this framework could see more tools, and more optimization for Apple platforms coming to you soon.
ISF for Metal – Now open source!
This came last week with a lot of other promising advancements for open-source technologies giving artists new freedom, as well as me sneaking in a shot of the aerospace museum in Belgrade in case anyone noticed: