RenderWave shaders

RenderWave appears in two distinct places in Ultimate VJ, and they are easy to confuse:

1. RenderWave shader sources — a GPU shader that is the clip's image, supplying pixels upstream of effects. Reached from the Shader Browser.
2. Kaleidoscope · RenderWave — the single effect instance that runs through the RenderWave runtime.

Shader sources

A clip using a RenderWave source gets its pixels from the GPU frame rather than from a media file (Sources/VJMac/ConsoleRenderer.swift:932-939). Nothing else about the clip changes: it still has a transform, effects, audio settings and its own transport.

How they are discovered

Catalog metadata is read through a compiled catalog library: libRenderWaveCatalogRuntime.dylib in Contents/Frameworks, or the path in the ULTIMATEVJ_RENDERWAVE_CATALOG_PATH environment variable.

• One catalog is loaded per process, so switching catalogs requires restarting the app.
• If no catalog is present you see "RenderWave is unavailable. Saved shader settings are retained."
• Each shader's compiled Metal library is <metalFile>.metallib under RenderWaveRuntime/Shaders.

Applying one

Shader Browser → search → Apply (or double-click). Applying inserts the shader into the selected slot and switches the Inspector to the Source tab.

The browser search matches display name, category or summary, and the grid shows name plus category.

Controls

Each shader exposes controls of three kinds — float, integer and toggle — rendered as slider, stepper and checkbox respectively. The first six are inline; the rest sit under a More controls disclosure.

Uniforms available to a shader include TIME, RENDERSIZE, bpm, beat and bar phase, and param1…param26.

Catalog contract limits (these are enforced when the catalog is read):

Saving and reusing looks

Extension .uvjshader, default filename Shader look.uvjshader, maximum 1 MiB.

The payload is the shader selection — its values, version, source version, descriptor, any animation drivers, and a preset name taken from the filename (truncated to 80 characters). Because each control row offers the standard Animate editor, animation travels inside the preset.

A shader that is unavailable in this build is retained as opaque data with "This shader is unavailable in this build. Its preset data is retained." — never substituted.

The RenderWave effect

Kaleidoscope · RenderWave is the only effect kind routed through RenderWave (Sources/VJMac/ConsoleEffectStack.swift:41). It needs a prepared GPU frame; without one its scope renders black and reports "RenderWave effects runtime is not prepared."

Not verified

• How many shaders ship, and their names. That depends on which catalog library is present at runtime, and no catalog file exists in the repository checkout — only the ABI header. The code permits 1…256. Any specific count should be read from the Shader Browser's own <n> shaders line, which is generated from whatever catalog is installed.
• Which shaders are available in a given third-party catalog.