Catoptron

Record captures the live canvas in realtime. HQ Video renders offline frame-by-frame via WebCodecs — loops close exactly, and Feedback history is rebuilt at export resolution. With an audio file loaded and MP4 selected, HQ Video re-analyses the track offline so the reactivity stays frame-synced and muxes the audio into the file. A video source carries its own soundtrack into the export the same way — just pick MP4 and leave sync audio ticked (the Audio panel takes priority if a track is loaded there).

Draw smooth spline strokes that become the source image — so the fold stack, IFS, fluid and renderers all act on your lines. Turn on Draw mode and drag on the canvas; strokes are captured as vectors, so they stay crisp at any export size and save inside presets. line + nodes is a pen tool: drag on empty canvas to pull out a perfectly straight line, then click anywhere on that line to drop a node and drag it to warp the curve. Drag any node to reshape; alt-click (or right-click) a node deletes it. Curve is per line: it reshapes whichever line is selected (click one of its nodes to select), so you can keep one line angular and make another flowing. With nothing selected it sets the default for the next line you draw. 0 gives dead-straight segments with hard corners, higher values give smooth curves. copy / paste / dupe (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V / Ctrl+D) clone the selected line so you can lay down a shape once and vary the copies; ✕ or Delete removes it. freehand is the old sketch mode — sketch loosely then hit to nodes to convert it into editable control points.

Style follows the selection: Ink, Grad, Width, Opacity, Brush, Taper, Fill, Curve and Symmetry all restyle the selected line, or set the default for the next one when nothing is selected. closed joins the last node to the first, which also lets fill work (add a second Fill colour for a gradient fill). grad blends Ink into the second colour along the stroke. Brush gives dashed / dotted / calligraphic / outline styles, and Taper thins the ends so lines look drawn rather than extruded. Symmetry lays one line down as N mirrored or radial copies in the source — which the folds then act on again. The transform row rotates, scales and flips the whole selected line; back / front reorder which line draws on top; shift-drag a node moves the entire line. snap locks nodes to a grid for clean geometry. The circle / poly / star / spiral / grid buttons drop in ready-made shapes as node paths you can then warp. BG opacity controls how much of the working image shows through: at 1 the Bg colour is solid and you get lines on a flat field; at 0 your lines and text sit straight on the loaded photo (or generator, or camera); in between it tints or dims the image behind them. The combined result is what feeds the fold stack. Text converts a typed word into real editable outlines: the letters are traced into closed node paths you can drag, warp, fill and fold like anything else. Detail trades node count against fidelity — raise it for chunky, angular letterforms. Holes (inside ‘o’, ‘a’) are detected so fills read correctly. The flat / live button switches how you draw: flat shows an opaque 1:1 preview of the source you are feeding the stack, while live hides it so you draw straight over the folded result. The preview fills the canvas exactly the way the source does, so what you draw is where it lands. Switch Draw mode off to see the folded result full-screen. Undo stroke also works with Ctrl+Z.

A real Life-like automaton running in its own buffers. Rule picks the world — Conway’s Life for gliders and still lifes, Maze and Coral for spreading structure, Seeds for explosive chaos, Anneal and Diamoeba for crystalline blobs. Speed is generations per second, so it stays steady whatever the framerate. Trails leaves a soft decaying tail behind live cells, which is what makes the pattern read as artwork rather than pixels — turn it down for hard cells. Feed from chooses what the colony eats: the source image (your photo plus drawing and text, before folding) or the live render — the finished, folded, colour-graded frame, which makes the automaton feed on its own output and evolve with whatever the rest of the program is doing. Image feed keeps that picture spawning new cells where it is bright, so the colony continuously grows out of your photo, drawing and text rather than running in isolation — and Audio burst throws in new life on transients. View · image colour makes living cells reveal the picture in full colour, age heat tints cells by how long they have survived. Seed · from image sets the starting colony from the picture. Mix blends it over your render; the CA warp fold instead pushes the fold stack along the pattern so it deforms your artwork.

A real fluid solver running in the background: velocity is advected, stirred, made incompressible by a pressure solve, and carries a dye field that the source image is injected into. Dye mix blends that flowing dye over your render (1 = pure fluid). Add the Fluid warp fold to push the fold stack around by the same velocity field instead. Dye source picks what gets injected: the current render (so the fluid carries your whole workspace — folds, IFS, colour) or the raw source image. Hold the left mouse button and drag on the canvas to stir it. The ❚❚ button freezes the sim where it is (the dye stays on screen); the global pause (Space) freezes it too. Higher Pressure = more incompressible (and slower); Vorticity re-injects swirl the solver damps out.

Drift falls through the reflections, spin rotates everything, wobble undulates the whole pattern. Pulse breathes the zoom, sway drifts the framing, hue cycle rotates colours over time. Stutter quantises the clock into steps, jitter shakes the framing per frame, and glitch burst spikes channel-split/noise/dropout on a beat (0 = still). Motion blur smears moving areas by blending recent frames (static areas stay sharp) — it blurs all motion, including audio-driven moves.

Drive parameters from live sound. Enable, choose mic or a file, then map Bass / Mid / Treble / Level / Beat onto a target with a bipolar amount. Sensitivity scales input gain; Response sets how snappy the reaction is. Base values are untouched — turn audio off and everything returns to normal.