stained glass effect
SourceEffect01/ ORIGIN
Cathedral glass was never painted like a picture. Coloured glass was cut into pieces and held in grooved lead strips called cames, so the dark lines running through a window are structural: without them the panel collapses. Twelfth and thirteenth century workshops at Chartres and the Sainte-Chapelle built entire narrative cycles inside that constraint, designing the leading as drawing rather than working around it. The effect imitates a load-bearing decision.
02/ SWEEP
PANE SIZE sweep
03/ SPEC
This effect segments the image into flat-coloured regions and draws a dark border along every boundary, imitating cut glass held in lead. PANE SIZE runs from 1 to 8 pixels with a default of 2 and sets the segmentation scale, so it controls how many panes the image is broken into: low values keep facial detail across many small pieces, high values reduce a portrait to a few dozen. CONTRAST expands tone before segmentation, which decides how confidently the boundaries fall. In kott it renders in natural colour so the panes carry the source hue rather than a grey ramp.
it can move to the music
Every control of this effect can follow a track. Pick a signal in the studio’s audio panel (the beat, the downbeat, a build, the bass, or an EQ band you set yourself), point it at pane size or any other control here, and set how far it moves. The sound comes from your microphone, a browser tab or a file you load, and it is analysed on your own machine.
how the audio routing works04/ FAQ
- What is a stained glass effect?
- A stained glass effect breaks an image into flat regions of colour separated by dark borders, imitating pieces of cut glass held together by lead strips in a cathedral window.
- Why are the lines in stained glass dark?
- They are lead. Coloured glass is cut and held in grooved lead cames, which are structural rather than decorative, so the dark lattice is what physically holds the panel together.
- What PANE SIZE keeps a face recognisable?
- Stay at 1 or 2. Above about 4 the panes grow larger than facial features, so eyes and mouth get absorbed into single flat pieces and the likeness goes.
