The Creative Coding Magazine
p5.js, Three.js, WebGPU, shaders, and the libraries and projects pushing generative and procedural work forward.
CircuitPython Turbo, from Adafruit's Mikey Sklar, pairs a 2–3KB native-code loader (now importable on RP2xxx boards as of CircuitPython 10.3.1) with a host CLI that compiles marked functions via mpy-cross. On twelve boards, viper-compiled inner loops ran 19x to 72x faster than bytecode.
ArmorPaint 1.0 shipped on September 4 after eight years in early access, rebuilt entirely in C with its own 3D engine, 2D drawing system, and UI. It brings Direct3D 12, Vulkan, Metal and WebGPU backends, basic sculpting and UV editing, timeline playback for skinned characters, and on-device generative nodes for photo-to-material and upscaling.
eenk is an open-source firmware and companion editor that lets writers author branching interactive fiction in inkle's ink scripting language and play it back on Xteink, a family of cheap ESP32-powered e-ink readers — turning a budget hackable gadget into a dedicated text-adventure console.
Every browser-based shader tool covered here — Shaders v3, Paper Shaders, ShaderVine — is built on WGSL. The language underneath all of them just moved a real step closer to being permanently locked in.
Not every shader-tool release is about new effects. This one's about the pipeline not silently corrupting memory while you're building them.
Unity's pitch for its next major version isn't new features so much as removing the two things that make iteration painful: slow shader compiles and a migration everyone dreads.
A hand-curated shader library that used to be a paid product is now free, commercial-use-included, and framework-agnostic. That changes the calculus for anyone who was reaching for Figma's generative shaders instead.
Getting an audio model running locally usually means a Python environment, a CUDA version argument, and an afternoon. A single C++ binary that loads a GGUF file is a different proposition — and downloads jumped 42% overnight.
TouchDesigner artists have lived with unmergeable binary project files for years. Embody turns networks into diffable text and lets an AI agent build them through 60 exposed tools.
Shipping web shaders used to mean writing raw WGSL and fighting bundle size. Shaders v3's TypeGPU-based engine compiles up to 25x faster and ships 3x smaller — while adding a proper visual editor on top.
Vector animation for the web has meant After Effects plus an exporter plus a handoff. Lottie Creator 2.0 collapses that into a browser tab — and adds no-code interactivity that a static Lottie file never had.
cables.gl let anyone patch together real-time WebGL visuals in a browser. Now it runs offline and is fully open source under MIT — a meaningful shift for a creative-coding tool that had always been tethered to the cloud.
TouchDesigner is node-based, powerful, and notoriously hard to version-control. Embody plugs it into an AI agent you can just talk to — and adds an open, diffable file format the community has wanted for years.
For most beginners, p5.js *is* the p5.js Web Editor. As of July, that editor defaults to 2.x — quietly handing millions of learners a WebGPU renderer and a modern toolchain, while 1.x keeps working.
SIGGRAPH's technical papers get the citations, but the Experience Hall is where the conference's real-time and interactive research becomes something you can actually walk up and try. This year's lineup includes robot dogs running evolving language models.
SOPs have run on the CPU since TouchDesigner existed. POPs are the first real answer to what that's been costing generative geometry work.