Effects

Effects sit on top of whatever visual is running. They leave the shader alone and process what it renders: a color shift, a mirror or repeat, its own past frames thrown back at it, a strobe, a sharpen, a grade before it reaches your output. Stack these treatments on any visual, in any combination.

Opening the Effects panel

In Performance view, the sparkles icon in the top bar toggles the Effects panel open as a side panel. Inside are three collapsible sections: Effects, Display Effects, and Lab FX. The Effects and Lab FX headers carry a badge showing how many of their effects are currently on; Display Effects doesn’t show a count.

Turning an effect on

Every effect in the panel is a row: a toggle switch, the effect’s name, and (for effects with controls) a chevron. Tap the row to expand its controls once the effect is on. Each numeric control has a small reset button next to its slider that snaps that one value back to its shipped default, the same mechanic used across the app; see Parameters and controls for the general pattern.

Turning an effect off resets it, so switching it back on later starts from its default look, not wherever you last left it.

FX presets

The Effects section opens with a horizontal strip of presets, one-tap combinations built from the FX effects below. Applying a preset clears any FX effects currently on, then enables and configures the ones the preset uses. A preset only touches the FX effects group and leaves Display Effects and Lab FX alone.

Clean: turns every FX effect off.
Mirror Pulse: a full mirror plus a beat-reactive feedback trail, RGB split, and a beat-synced strobe.
Kaleido Wash: an 8-segment kaleidoscope with a slow spin, washed with a cyan-tinted color shift.
Echo Tunnel: a static transform feeding a warped, zooming feedback trail for a tunneling effect.
Neon Split: a wide RGB split under a hot-pink color tint.

Use a preset as a starting point, then open the individual effect rows to fine-tune.

Effects (FX)

These seven are the core performance effects, the ones the presets above are built from:

Transform: pans, scales, rotates, and spins the frame. An optional wrap mode lets content re-enter the opposite edge instead of clipping at the frame boundary.
Mirror: reflects the frame across an axis you choose (X, Y, Both, or Quad), with an offset and angle to move the mirror line.
Kaleidoscope: splits the frame into repeating segments (2 to 32) that fan out around the center, with an adjustable spin speed.
RGB Split: offsets the red, green, and blue channels from each other for a chromatic-aberration look, with a beat-synced boost option.
Feedback: recirculates prior frames back onto the current one. Three modes: Blend, Add, and Warp, each with zoom, rotation, and color shift per pass, and an optional beat boost.
Color FX: hue shift, saturation, and a color tint you dial in with an overlay amount.
Strobe: flashes the frame on a rate you set in Hz, or locks it to the beat grid (quarter, eighth, sixteenth, half note, or full bar). Color mode controls what it flashes to (white, black, invert, a tint, RGB, or the source image), and it can be modulated by bass, mid, treble, or the full signal.

Display Effects

Display Effects sit at the end of the chain, shaping the final image rather than the visual’s content: Bloom (threshold, knee, and intensity for glow on bright areas), Tone Mapping (an exposure control over the app’s tone curve, on by default), and Sharpen (intensity and radius).

Lab FX

Lab FX is the larger, more experimental catalog: stylistic and processing effects you layer on for a specific look rather than reach for every set.

Cinematic Pass: film grain and chromatic aberration together, for a cinematic finish.
CRT Effect: scanlines, curvature, aperture grille, and sync wobble for an old-tube look.
Color Grading: temperature, tint, and separate shadow/midtone/highlight intensity.
Colorizer: remaps the image to one, two, or a gradient of colors, with an intensity control.
Hue Rotate: continuously rotates hue at a speed you set, with a saturation boost.
Edge Detection: isolates edges in the frame with an adjustable threshold.
Pixelation: chunks the image into blocks of a size you set.
Halftone: renders the frame as a dot pattern, dot size adjustable.
Voronoi Mosaic: breaks the frame into cell-based mosaic tiles, cell size adjustable.
Spectrum Shift: an FFT-driven color/frequency shift, controlled by intensity.
Gaussian Blur (MPS) and Soft Blur (MPS): GPU-accelerated blur effects, radius and strength respectively.
Heat Haze: a shimmering heat-distortion wave over the frame.
God Rays: light shafts radiating from a point you position, with exposure, decay, density, and weight controls.
Motion Blur: directional blur driven by a velocity you set on each axis.
Chromatic Aberration: a standalone color-fringing effect, separate from Cinematic Pass’s built-in version.
Film Grain: standalone grain with intensity, grain size, and how much it favors dark or light areas.

Scene transitions

Transitions control how RENDERWAVE moves from one scene to the next, whether you trigger the change yourself or AUTOPILOT does it for you. Open the transition controls from Performance view’s bottom panel to set them.

There are two settings: a Style menu and a Duration slider (0 to 5 seconds). Style options are Cut, Alpha Fade, Difference Fade, RGB Fade, Dissolve, Wipe Left, Wipe Right, Wipe Up, Wipe Down, Circle Open, Circle Close, Pixelate, and Glitch. The setting is global, so whatever style and duration you pick applies to every scene change until you change it again.

For how scene cells and AUTOPILOT actually trigger these transitions, see the Performance view guide.

Next steps

Overlays: add a text, logo, or video layer on top of your visuals, independent from the effects stack.
Parameters and controls: the slider and reset mechanics used throughout the app.
Shader library: what effects are layered on top of.
Performance view: the grid, AUTOPILOT, and where transitions play out live.