R&D
Lab notes
from the bench.
Every tool here was written in the middle of a job, because the alternative was a workaround that would have shown in the final frame. What broke, what was measured, and what shipped.
RIFT Glass
An After Effects plugin: real-time glass refraction, worked out on the graphics card. Available for Windows and macOS.
Refraction that behaves like glass rather than like a blur: index of refraction, dispersion and thickness, worked out on the graphics card.
Written because faking it in the timeline meant re-faking it for every shot.
- Works in
- After Effects 2023 and newer
- Runs on
- Windows 10 and 11, macOS 14 or newer on Apple Silicon
- Colour depth
- 8, 16 and 32 bit
- Plugin size
- about 0.6 MB
- Version
- 1.2.1
- Built
- June to October 2026
- First working version
- Any shape, not only a panel
- RIFT Glass 1.0
- 30-day public beta
- Ported to macOS
- Version 1.2.1
ScriptUI panels
Subtitle systems, corner tracking and procedural rigging, written for the work in front of me.
Subtitle systems, corner tracking and procedural rigging, the parts of the job that are the same every time.
Each one started as a repeated afternoon and ended as a button.
Alert overlay
A real-time overlay system in Three.js on a WebSocket pipeline.
A browser-source overlay in Three.js, fed over a WebSocket, rendering to a live broadcast without a render queue in sight.
Built for a show that could not wait for After Effects.
Need something
that does not exist yet?