Shader Lab, like Photoshop but for shaders
Details
- External ID
- 47796759
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Shader Lab, like Photoshop but for shaders
- Website domain
- basement.studio
- Launched
- April 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 160
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9421593830334191
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche creative and graphics software
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- shader editor and visual tool
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a full-blown WebGPU visual shader compositor with TSL compilation, timeline keyframing, and custom real-time visual effects requires specialized computer graphics engineering.
What it would actually take: The engine requires deep WebGPU and WGSL/TSL (Three.js Shading Language) expertise to create an interactive node/layer compositing graph with multi-pass rendering pipelines. The system needs custom timeline animation curves, audio FFT binding, shader AST compilation in the browser, and hardware texture memory management. Building this demands veteran graphics programming and audio/video pipeline experience.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Unicorn Studio (layer-based shader composition tool), react-neon (React library for shader overlays)
Concerns raised: WebGL context limit issues with multiple elements on page, Performance/battery drain - high CPU usage and fan spin-up, One-frame lag with scrolling due to observer and viewport matching, Browser speed constraints for keeping overlays positioned during scroll, AI models historically poor at writing shaders until recently
Feature requests: WebGPU support to replace WebGL context limitations, FPS caps or performance optimization for thermal efficiency
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 284 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #23 of 285 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 164 days after the earliest competitor.
- wled-toy · github · 2026-09-21 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- MaterialXTeapotLion · github · 2026-09-14 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- VulkanaImageEditor · github · 2026-09-27 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- ComfyUI-Krea2-Pixel-Art-Refiner · github · 2026-09-16 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Compositor · github · 2026-09-16 · 3456 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- spark-image-lab · github · 2026-09-20 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- ShaderKit · hn · 2026-05-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- xuan · github · 2026-09-19 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.