tcl-studio

tcl-studio is a Godot-based visual studio for creating procedural scientific, mathematical, and physics-driven videos. The project is designed around a simple workflow: build reusable visual entities, expose their meaningful controls in the Inspector, and animate them with AnimationPlayer to create clean, explainable shots without writing custom code for every scene.

The idea is not to build a single game, but to create a reusable toolkit for explaining concepts visually. If an object can be parameterized, styled, and animated in the editor, it becomes a building block for scientific storytelling and procedural motion design.

Core idea

This project treats Godot as a motion-graphics and scientific visualization studio rather than a traditional game project. The workflow is:

1. Create or reuse a procedural object.
2. Expose important properties in the Inspector.
3. Tune the visual state directly in the editor.
4. Animate the scene with keyframes and timelines.
5. Capture the result as a video.

This keeps most production work visual and editable. Code is used when a new feature or behavior is truly needed, but the goal is to keep standard video creation in the editor as much as possible.

What this project is for

tcl-studio is focused on producing shots and scenes for:

• mathematical animations
• physics explanations
• chemistry and molecular visualizations
• procedural environments and structures
• geometric diagrams and shape-based motion graphics
• camera-driven storytelling with editor-tuned animation

The library is intentionally organized around reusable systems that can be combined to explain ideas without needing to hand-code large portions of each new animation.

Current library structure

The active project structure is centered around the library/ directory and its core feature groups:

• animation_handlers/ - reusable animation logic for fades, movement, transforms, creation effects, property tweens, and timed action sequencing.
• base/ - base Godot nodes, helpers, and reusable visual primitives for 2D, 3D, labels, backgrounds, meshes, and presentation elements.
• Chemical Elements/ - atom, bond, and molecule-related systems for chemistry and scientific visualizations.
• environmental entities/ - procedural structures and world-building generators such as houses and stylized environment components.
• GodoTeX/ - mathematical and TeX-style rendering support.
• Indications/ - visual emphasis and annotation effects.
• mesh-premitive-wrapper/ - wrappers and helpers for mesh-based generation.
• misc/ - small supporting utilities and experiments.
• Shaders/ - shader-based materials and visual effects.
• shapes-2d/ and the shapes-derived/, shapes-derived-quad/, and shapes-derived-RSBased/ folders - reusable geometry and shape systems for diagrams and visual storytelling. shapes-derived-quad/ builds shapes from quads, while shapes-derived-RSBased/ is built around render-oriented primitives.

Removed experimental folders such as BlobCharacter/ and the old brackeys_vfx_bundle/ content are not part of the current project scope.

The Chopstick Lab project content

content/the-chopstick-lab/ holds material specific to The Chopstick Lab video page, separate from the reusable visual toolkit. It includes folders for images, QR codes, demo videos, and reference material such as scripts, research notes, and briefs. See content/the-chopstick-lab/README.md for the folder layout.

Documentation

See DOCUMENTATION.md for an index of the reusable systems and links to setup, animation, geometry, science, and rendering guides. The individual guides live in docs/.

Editor add-ons

The addons/ directory contains three editor plugins. Enable them from Project > Project Settings > Plugins; all three are already enabled in project.godot.

Components Browser (addons/components_browser/)

Adds a Components tab to the editor's bottom panel. It presents the curated (class_name) nodes in library/ with search and category filters, so they can be added directly to the selected scene node without browsing Godot's full node list. Drag an entry onto the 2D or 3D editor to add it to the Scene Tree, or double-click it (or select it and choose Add to Scene).

Render Queue (addons/render_queue/)

Adds a Render Queue tab that queues scenes and renders them to video through Godot's Movie Maker mode, one job per separate Godot process. See its README for usage and output formats.

tcl-gui (addons/tcl-gui/)

Provides bindable 2D GUI controls (slider, toggle, button, stepper, level meter, circular slider, and range slider) plus a BindTarget resource that maps a control's value to a node property or method. An inspector plugin turns the binding target into a dropdown of the real properties and methods on the chosen node. See its README.

Project setup

• Engine: Godot 4.7
• .NET target: net8.0
• Languages: GDScript and C#
• Rendering: Forward Plus (Direct3D 12 driver on Windows)
• Physics: Jolt Physics
• Platform focus: Windows development workflow

The project config is set up as a Godot .NET project and includes support for C# along with a few scientific/visual packages used for math and rendering.

Using the library/ directory on its own

If someone takes only the library/ directory and uses it in a separate Godot project, it is not a standalone, self-contained plugin by default. The library assumes the Godot project is configured with the proper .NET environment and the necessary C# references.

In that case, the user should install the required .NET components for the project they are using, especially:

• .NET SDK compatible with the target project setup
• the Godot .NET support layer for C# scripts
• any NuGet packages referenced by the project, such as CSharpMath, CSharpMath.SkiaSharp, and SkiaSharp

In other words, when the library is used independently, the user must install and configure the needed .NET modules and package dependencies separately, even though the visual code itself is organized as a reusable Godot library.

Reusable animation system

A central tool in the project is ProcAnim, which wraps common animation tasks into a clean API for scene composition. It supports operations such as:

• moving and rotating nodes
• fader effects and transitions
• object creation/pop-in effects
• camera transforms
• visual indication rings and emphasis effects
• property tweening with timing and easing controls
• parallel and sequential animation patterns

This helps keep scenes expressive while still allowing the project to remain editor-driven instead of script-heavy.

Design philosophy

tcl-studio follows a few clear principles:

• editor-first authoring
• procedural generation over manual duplication
• reusable visual tools over one-off script logic
• deterministic parameters when needed
• visual clarity for scientific communication

The point is not simply to generate pretty objects, but to create scenes that can be tuned, explained, and captured in a controlled way for video production.

Current status

This project is an active visual toolkit and experimentation space. It is not a finished product in the usual sense; it is a reusable library for building scientific and procedural visual stories inside Godot. The cleanest workflow is still to keep scenes strongly parameterized, visually adjustable, and animation- ready so they remain easy to produce and refine over time.

License

This project is available under the MIT License.