A standalone playground for image-style shaders written in real C/C++. Multipass float buffers, video & webcam, procedural audio, freefly camera — all on the CPU. No driver roulette.
Everything you expect from a modern shader playground — plus a real native toolchain.
GLM, rsw_math, PortableGL math, or your own libraries. Open a .c or .cpp and Workshop compiles it and hot-reloads when you save.
Build the .so or .dll yourself in Zig, Rust, Odin, Go, Nelua, or another C ABI language. Workshop does not compile those. It hot-reloads the binary when that file changes.
A–D style passes, RGBA32F storage, independent resolutions, pass recursion, and previous-frame feedback via u_main.
Own the whole framebuffer with mainFrame. SIMD, custom loops, full-buffer algorithms.
2D, cubemaps, volumes, video files, webcam, screen capture, local paths and URLs.
mainSound, FFT/wave textures, mic input, always-on spectrogram, post-mix analysis.
Built-in camera uniforms for exploring 3D scenes.
Screenshots, MP4 video, and audio-only capture.
Pause, scrub, FPS control, locked or free canvas size.
Breakpoints, prints, profilers — normal C tools.
Demo videos and a few looks at the UI.
Browser playgrounds are great. Sometimes you want something else.
No account, no network requirement, no “the site is down” when you want to create. Packages for Linux and Windows.
C and C++ are compiled for you. Any other C ABI language works once you build the shared library; Workshop reloads that file when it changes. Either way you get real state and a normal debugger.
Software rendering means fewer driver surprises — and a playground for OpenMP, SIMD, and performance nerdery.
Shadertoy · FragCoord · Shader Workshop — what each product is strong at.
Available now on itch.io. One-time purchase includes updates through 1.x. No subscription, no ads — buy once, own forever.