High Performance

Friction provides a scalable, high-performance GPU/CPU vector and raster pipeline developed in C++, using Skia and the Qt framework.

Animations for the Web

Create smooth and responsive animations for the web with Friction! Using Friction, you can create animated scalable vector graphics (SVG) using the synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL), as recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Multiple Scenes and Timelines

Friction gives you the flexibility to work on multiple scenes at once, with multiple viewers, timelines, and graphs. Adjust it to fit your needs and screen real estate.

Powerful Expression Editor

Power users are welcome! Friction provides support for expressions with ECMAScript in parameters and effects. Additionally, it includes a complete code editor with autocompletion, syntax highlighting, custom functions, and more.

Text and Path Effects

Friction includes a diverse range of effects for enhancing your vector graphics and text. Stay tuned for upcoming releases, as we continue to expand our collection of effects.

Raster/Shader Effects

Friction offers experimental support for user-customizable shader effects. A limited set of effects are included.

System Requirements

Most computers in use today should work just fine with Friction. The only strict requirements are:

• OpenGL 3.3 compatible graphics card
• NVIDIA GeForce 8000 series minimum
• AMD Radeon HD 2000 series minimum
• Intel HD Graphics 4000 minimum
• AVX compatible CPU
• Intel Sandy Bridge Core i3/i5/i7 or newer
• AMD Bulldozer or newer

In general, a dual-core laptop with 4GB of RAM should be usable for small projects. Larger projects and/or the use of raster graphics and effects will require more RAM and CPU/GPU power.

Supported Platforms

Friction currently supports the following platforms:

• Microsoft Windows 10/11
• Ubuntu 22.04/23.04/23.10 and compatible
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7/8/9 and compatible
• Generic Linux

Platform support may undergo changes in future releases without prior notice.

FFmpeg Multimedia Framework

FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge.

Skia Graphics Engine

Skia is an open source 2D graphics library which provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms. It serves as the graphics engine for Google Chrome, ChromeOS, Android, Flutter, Mozilla Firefox and many other products.