Asterias Studio
2026-07-25
As I mentioned when I was first restarting my site, I really miss StarfishX. So, since I currently am playing with Codex, I decided to implement it in Swift. The original is GPL2, so my version is too — if you have XCode you can build it for yourself!
Even though I didn’t really do any of the coding, I did manage the work. Since one of my first bosses said to me when I said I only managed the people doing the work, “You are responsible for it happening, even if you didn’t do the work, therefore it is your success.”
Anyway, I’m really happy with how it turned out!
- It generates layered procedurally generated images using the original generators (bubble, coswave, flatwave, rangefrac, spinflake)
- It adds 3 new generators: Flame, Julia, and Voronoi
- It exports in PNG or TIFF
- It includes “recipe” data in the exported image so you can revisit an earlier image (with drag-and-drop)
- It is SUPER FAST, thanks to moving pattern generation to Metal — so it will work best on a modern Mac
How fast? Before Metal, 1920x1080 6-layer image took 126 seconds. After Metal, the same settings produced the same image in 4.63 seconds.
Here are a few samples (all are 512 square and tiling)
I already have a list of improvements I’d like to make for myself, but I’ll have to wait for my credits to build up again 😉