Earlier this year fellow visualist and live coder Rumblesan commissioned me to make some gifs for his new live coding software, Improviz. In July he unleashed it into the world!

Looking at the above videos you could easily be forgiven for thinking that it looks a bit like LiveCodeLab. He is, after all, one of the developers of LiveCodeLab. However, Improviz differs in a few ways. As Rumblesan himself explains in the Toplap chat:

the language in Improviz has a lot in common with live code lab, and the basic functionality for shapes, styles, transformations and loops is all pretty much the same. but in terms of implementation and usage they’re very different

lcl is using three.js as an intermediary, whilst improviz is entirely haskell and uses opengl directly (which I think long term is going to cause me grief but we’ll see haha)

the major difference is that improviz lets you use images and gifs as textures, which is something I’d like to back port to lcl, but wouldn’t be a small task unfortunately

That’s right, you can load textures! As mentioned before Rumblesan commissioned me to make a set of gifs to go along with the initial public release. They’re all released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence so you’re free to use them as you wish as long as you attribute me.

As an added bonus I’m also releasing the .blend file that was used to make each one.

Click here to download the Blender files.

These were made using a beta version of Blender 2.80. I’ve tested them in the stable release and they appear to work fine but they definitely will not work in 2.79 or earlier versions. I’m providing these for you to explore and won’t be doing a writeup/tutorial on how they work. If you remix them please share what you make 🙂

Definitely give Improviz a try! Thanks to Rumblesan for commissioning me to make the gifs 🙂