Getting Started

Quickstart

Install R3NE, build your first graph, and send a live signal out to Syphon. About five minutes end to end.

Requirements

  • macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer.
  • Apple Silicon (M1 or later). Intel Macs are not supported.
  • A Syphon-aware receiver to verify output (Resolume, MadMapper, Simple Server, OBS with the Syphon plugin, etc).

Install

Download the latest signed, notarized .dmg from the homepage (or the releases page). Mount it and drag R3NE.app to /Applications. R3NE updates itself in place, so you only do this once.

Start a project

Launch R3NE. A launcher appears over the main window with your recent projects and two buttons:

  1. Click New Project. (Or reopen a recent one, or Open… a saved .r3d file.)
  2. In New Project, set the resolution, frame rate and the color pipeline — precision (8 / 10 / 16-bit float), working space (gamma or linear) and output color space (sRGB, Display P3 or HDR). The defaults (1080p · 8-bit · gamma · sRGB) are fine to start. Confirm.
  3. You land on the canvas with a single Root node already placed. You can revisit these settings any time from File ▸ Project Settings… (⌘⇧,).

Your first graph

  1. Press Tab on the canvas to open the searchable node picker (or drag from the Node Library on the left). Add a Live Input camera source — or a generator like Plasma if you have no camera.
  2. Drag from the source’s texture output port into one of the Root node’s texture inputs.
  3. The preview at the top of the window shows the live result. Select any node to edit its parameters in the Properties panel on the right.

Send it out (Syphon)

Whatever feeds Root is your composite. To share it with another app on the same Mac:

  1. Open the Render menu and turn on Syphon Output (⌘⌥1). Pick a server name from the same menu.
  2. Open your receiver and select the new Syphon server — you should be looking at your composite, running on Metal at the project’s frame rate. (NDI Output / ⌘⌥2 streams it over the network instead.)

Add an effect

R3NE’s post-effects work as a loopback: connect a node’s texture output into an effect’s texture input and the effect is applied to that source.

  1. Press Tab and add a Glow (bloom) effect.
  2. Wire your source’s texture output into Glow’s texture input, then feed Glow into Root.
  3. Tweak threshold and intensity in the inspector and watch the preview and receiver update live — no recompile pause.

Where to next