Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mcao 1440 days ago
Hi everybody, I'm the creator of Astrofox. Surprised to see this here, but I'll be glad to answer any questions.

Astrofox has been my side project for several years now. It's basically my playground for trying out things like Electron, React and WebGL. It's open-source, MIT licensed, and totally free to use.
5 comments
hippich 1439 days ago
Thank you so much for that! Finally something to make visuals when sharing on video sites!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzQt11AOslQ

This one took less than 20 minutes from scratch (never seen this app before) (rendering into 4k is another story - it is hours very slow, which is probably understandable with web rendering involved.)

Quick skim reveals it uses React and WebGL shaders to create these effects. React part is easy. Is there something recommended I could read about shaders in order to be able to contribute objects/effects to Astrofox?

link
mike_d 1440 days ago
Incredibly cool. I've always wondered what tool was used to make the visuals associated with pretty much every DJ set uploaded to YouTube.
link
Daub 1440 days ago
The current standard for making live visuals for events (i.e. 'vee jay') is Resolume. The one thing that Resolume lacks is effective support for importing 3D objects.

Its nice to see blend modes in this app. That offers the possibility of building up cool effects layer by layer.

link
mike_d 1440 days ago
That isn't what everyone on YouTube is using though. See an example here: https://youtu.be/d_G37G-8gMA?t=3329
link
Daub 1440 days ago
Ahhh. this is new to me. Thanks.
link
porjo 1440 days ago
Looks cool! Any plans to support headless operation? What I had in mind was to design a scene in the UI (for example a daily podcast), then on command line take the project file and the audio file and generate the video file output.
link
mcao 1440 days ago
I haven't looked into it so I am not sure if it's possible. The requirement would be for Electron to be able to run headless with WebGL enabled.
link
giancarlostoro 1440 days ago
The UI is beautiful, is it all from scratch? or did you use libraries, and where did you get inspiration for it from?

Sorry for the multiple questions, just not often I see something that catches my eye like that.

link
mcao 1440 days ago
Yes, the UI is all from scratch. My inspiration was from seeing other audio-reactive videos on Youtube, but those were rendered with either Adobe After Effects or a 3D program like Blender. I wanted to build something that was easy for the average person to use.
link
fullstackwife 1440 days ago
Did you simply reinvent Winamp?
link