At basement, we’re always raising the bar and pushing the limits on what’s possible. That means we’re constantly experimenting, say motion, texture, typography, image treatment, and realtime visuals. For that reason, we wanted a space where those explorations could happen faster and more freely.
Many of our processes involve explorations, in which we gather information about the visual direction we should head to. We find ourselves building internal tools that would enable this collaboration between our design and development squads.
In the era of personal software, almost anything is possible. As we developed and tested it internally, we realized it was something worth sharing. We take pride in what we build, and in an effort to encourage more people to do so, we’re embracing a more open approach—creating and sharing our work publicly.
Our Shader Lab
After a month of development we decided to publicly release our latest tool that makes it easier to play around with shaders by creating, mixing and tweaking multiple layers.
It’s been a real time saver for the team, especially during early explorations. Instead of coding ideas from scratch, we can quickly build and test them in the Lab. It also lets designers develop their ideas further without needing to code, helping to close the gap between concept and execution.
Hands on
Start with a simple source, like a video layer or a custom shader sketch. From there, build the composition by stacking effects, refining the image, and shaping it into a more defined visual direction.
Once the visual feels right, add motion directly in the timeline. A few keyframes are often enough to make the composition feel alive, without turning the process into a full animation workflow.
That package lets the same composition live inside a React app, either as its own rendered piece or as post-processing on top of an existing scene.
The workflow doesn’t stop at making the visual. It can also become part of the final product. Let’s try it with this composition: The goal was to roughly imitate a Star Wars’ holoprojector.
A holoprojector composition in Shader Lab
What’s to come
We quickly saw a strong response from the community, which we’re genuinely grateful for.
It’s been super exciting to see people take the tool in directions we hadn’t anticipated, exploring use cases we didn’t initially have in mind.
The tool continues to evolve and is open for everyone to come and build with us in the process. Looking forward to the near future where we plan on adding a collaboration mode, keyframe interpolation, layer and masking groups, and effect presets.
As always, thanks to the community for the support. And remember to ship your experiments to the world.
