imfx

imfx is a lightweight shader-driven animated texture framework designed as an addon for Dear ImGui It allows you to feed pixel shaders from strings, files, or raw byte blobs into a global context, modulate parameters in real-time, and bake them into standard textures (ImTextureID) for immediate rendering within your ImGui UI layouts

Note: This is just a fun little side project I put together with the help of Claude 4.6 Sonnet. I'm mainly just throwing it up here to share with the community, so feel free to play around with it!

Co-authored by Averta047 and Claude 4.6 Sonnet

Features

• Works with any renderer The core layout and effect settings do not care what graphics API you use, making it completely independent
• Easy shader loading You can load your shader code directly from regular strings, files on your disk, or raw binary files
• Matches ImGui style The setup, context creation, and loop steps match the exact design style of standard ImGui modules like CreateContext, NewFrame, and Shutdown while exclusively using ImGui's built-in types and wrapped utils
• Includes a default effect It comes with a built-in cloudy smoke shader
• DirectX 11 sample included Shipped with a working DX11 backend wrapper

Known Limitations

• Shaders depend on the renderer language Even though the main context system does not care about your graphics API, the shader code you pass to it does (controlled by the ImFXShaderLang enum) If you switch rendering backends, you have to update your shader code language accordingly
• Only DirectX 11 / HLSL supported for now Because this was built as a quick side project, I didn't bother adding support for other renderer backends or shader languages yet

Showcase

demo1.mp4

demo2.mp4

Usage Example

1 Initialization

// Backend free part, init our effect context where we store the shader code & array of effects + result texture
ImFX::CreateContext();

// Initialize effect backend
ImFX_ImplDX11_InitInfo info;
info.Device = pDevice;
info.DeviceContext = pDeviceContext;
info.CreateDefaultEffect = true; // Maps to Effects[0] & DefaultEffect, which is a built-in cloudy smoke effect
info.DefaultEffectSize = ImVec2(1280.0f, 720.0f);
ImFX_ImplDX11_Init(&info);

// Tweak default shader-effect params
if (info.CreateDefaultEffect)
{
    ImFXEffect* def = ImFX::GetContext()->DefaultEffect;
    def->Speed = 0.6f;
    def->Scale = 2.5f;
    def->Density = 0.1f;
    def->ColorA = ImVec4(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);
    def->ColorB = ImVec4(0.30f, 0.30f, 0.30f, 0.5f); // Usually the background, depends on the effect
}

// Push a new effect into the Effects vector, following the familiar ImGui pattern
ImFXEffect* voronoi = ImFX::CreateEffectFromString(g_VoronoiShader, ImFXShaderLang_HLSL, ImVec2(800.0f, 600.0f));

// Tweak custom effect params dynamically
voronoi->Speed = 1.2f;
voronoi->Scale = 3.5f;
voronoi->Density = 0.3f;
voronoi->ColorA = ImVec4(0.02f, 0.02f, 0.08f, 1.0f);  // Near-black background
voronoi->ColorB = ImVec4(0.20f, 0.60f, 0.90f, 1.0f);  // Cyan glow

2 Frame Update

// Update ImFX framework before the main ImGui frame update
ImFX_ImplDX11_NewFrame();
ImFX_ImplDX11_UpdateEffects(ImFX::GetContext());

// Standard ImGui backend update
ImGui_ImplDX11_NewFrame();
ImGui_ImplWin32_NewFrame();

3 Rendering

// Render the default effect (Index 0 when CreateDefaultEffect is enabled)
ImFXEffect* def = ImFX::GetContext()->DefaultEffect;
ImGui::Image(def->GetTexture(), def->Size);

// Render subsequent custom effects by accessing the context vector index directly
ImFXEffect* voronoi = ImFX::GetContext()->Effects[1];
ImGui::Image(voronoi->GetTexture(), voronoi->Size);

4 Cleanup

// Clean up the framework right before your standard ImGui cleanup sequence
ImFX_ImplDX11_Shutdown();
ImFX::DestroyContext();

// Standard ImGui cleanup
ImGui_ImplDX11_Shutdown();
ImGui_ImplWin32_Shutdown();
ImGui::DestroyContext();

Future Ideas

• Texture Inputs: Adding support for passing custom textures directly into the shader parameters
• Extra Custom Parameters: Expanding the parameter so you can add pass more data to your effects (could be usefull for complex effects)

License

This is free and unencumbered piece of code released into the public domain, you can do whatever you want with it :)