RICO Engine

Real-time Integration Control Operations. RICO is a free creative engine and signal hub for Windows. Make a whole piece inside it, or let it sit between your controllers, your creative apps and your hardware and make them talk to each other.

Watch the RICO Engine preview on YouTube

Turn a knob on a MIDI controller and move a light in Unreal, a camera in Blender or a parameter in Houdini. Send the visuals you make in RICO to TouchDesigner or to another computer on your network. Plug in a homemade controller and use it everywhere.

An engine and a bridge

RICO started as a bridge and is now a full engine. You can use it either way, or both at once:

• On its own. Make the whole piece inside RICO: motion graphics on a timeline, 3D scenes with living simulations, sound, lights, projection mapping and LED walls, all running live and rendered from one place. You do not need any other app.
• As a bridge. Keep the apps you already use, and let RICO connect them. A knob, a phone, a microphone or a sensor drives Unreal, Blender, TouchDesigner, lights and hardware at the same time.
• Both. Build part of the work in RICO and send it on, or bring signals and video in from other apps and use them in RICO's own scenes.

I made RICO because every app speaks a different language, and I was tired of needing five small tools to connect them. RICO is meant to be your right hand for all of these protocols, whether you are a VJ, a 3D artist, a designer or someone building their own hardware.

A look inside

From a photo to a mask. Open a picture, click the object, and RICO cuts it out as a projection mask.

From the mask to a gobo. The mask becomes a gobo plate with a sleeve that slides snugly over the projector lens.

Sliced and printed, without leaving RICO. Supports, settings and Send and print, straight to the printer.

What it speaks

	In	Out
MIDI	Any controller or app	Devices, apps and virtual ports
OSC	Phones, tablets, apps	Many apps at once
Video	Spout, OMT, NDI (plugin), screen capture	Spout, OMT, NDI (plugin)
Audio	What your computer plays	Low, mid, high and beat signals
Lights		DMX over Art-Net
Devices	MQTT (ESP32, Raspberry Pi)	MQTT

What's inside

• A new interface. Clean, fast and made for creative people, not only programmers. The original interface is still there as "classic".
• Workspaces you build. Tabs on top for each protocol. Split, stack and float panels, put MIDI, OSC and audio side by side, close what you don't use, and share a workspace with someone as a .ricospace file.
• Routes. One knob, OSC address or sound to many places at once: OSC, MIDI, DMX and MQTT, each with its own range.
• Nodes. Numbers, pictures (on the graphics card), 3D shapes, text and lists on typed wires, in sections from what comes in to what goes out. Write your own nodes, save them to My nodes, or put a network in a container. Save networks as .ricox files.
• Motion. Laid out like a compositing app: a green tool strip with your own tools, the project, the composition, effect controls, effects and presets, and the timeline. Layers of chroma glass, blobs, noise, grids, shapes, text, pictures and a camera, any setting linked to a knob, OSC or the kick drum. Precomps, ripple delete and close gap. A timeline that zooms from the whole comp to single frames, with solids, nulls, shape layers, text, adjustment layers, transforms and parenting, masks, track mattes, 34 effects, 16 blend modes, the usual motion graphics keys, rulers, guides and safe areas, rotoscoping (keyed mask paths, and a live clean-plate background remover), your own GLSL layers that react live, curves that send OSC, MIDI and DMX, cues, and real time or frame-exact MP4 rendering. The timeline zooms with a navigator bar, shows time as frames, seconds or timecode, folds keys into dots, and has comp settings (size, frame rate, snap, loop) one click away. Precomps play with their own time and show the layers under them through.
• Color. Grading, curves, levels, .cube LUTs, and a LUT matched from a single picture.
• Audio lab. Accurate bands you shape and name yourself, tempo, pitch, LUFS, input EQ, gate and compressor, and speech, music and effects detection, on its own thread.
• Sound editor. A multitrack session with live effects per track, instrument tracks you play from the keyboard or MIDI, recording, a piano roll and mixdown; plus a waveform editor and a sound generator.
• Projection mapping. Surfaces, grids, masks (also from a photo with a magic wand, or from a 3D object) that sit under the surface they mask and move with it, a canvas in the exact size you set, soft edges, 3D objects from a calibrated projector, and lens gobos: one per projector, the exact shape of your masks, on a round plate that slides snugly over the lens or into the lens hole.
• Print and laser. A slicer that sends gobos and STL files to Klipper, OctoPrint and PrusaLink printers or over USB, with the full set of print settings, normal and tree supports (and your own) found from the faces of the part, support walls that stand firm, profiles you can import, and automation for robots that work with the printer. Laser cutting for GRBL and FluidNC lasers.
• Lighting desk. Fixtures, groups, color and position, effects in time with the music, cues with fades, links to any signal, 3D twins with beams and heads that aim at 3D objects, Art-Net and sACN on many universes.
• LEDs and your own hardware. Send the picture to LED strips and walls (WLED, Art-Net, sACN, Adalight, Open Pixel Control) and values to a Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ESP32, MQTT, web addresses or WebSockets, with starter code for each.
• Phone and tablet controls. Build pages with faders, knobs, pads, a step sequencer, tap tempo and tilt, design them with titles, text, logos and pictures, scan a QR code, and send OSC (to any app or device), MIDI, DMX, MQTT, UDP or web addresses, or move anything in RICO, from your phone or tablet.
• MIDI rules. Translate any MIDI to MIDI, OSC, DMX or signals, one to many; monitor with filters; MIDI clock out.
• 3D playground. Model, sculpt and paint (with pen pressure), your own layered materials, iridescent film colors, cartoon shading with hand-drawn outlines, bloom, shapes from math and code, your own shaders, Motion as a texture, .glb, .fbx and .obj import with animations and every part on its own, strokes made of lines, dots or letters, pop art, pencil, watercolor, paper collage and moving chrome looks added on top of a model's own materials, 3D text in your own fonts, comic pages, deep world settings, and an export that bakes the look so it opens the same in other 3D apps. Mixed media paper that really crumples and lifts off the shape. A tool strip with stages for modeling, texturing, lighting, animating and rendering, an axis ball, World or Object handles, a 3D timeline, deformers (bend, twist, taper, squash, wave), morphing, bone posing, and light simulation: gravity, bumping, breaking and a small fluid. A movable pivot, so shapes turn, size and bend from the point you choose. All linkable to signals and usable as a Motion layer or a precomp with its own time.
• Symbiote. Turn any shape or model into a living alien goo. Its skin crawls, swells and breathes, with veins under the skin that push it out and throb. Tendrils shoot out toward things near it, a few thick and many thin, grab on, sag and stretch into a web when you pull away, then snap one by one, curl back and drip onto the floor, where the puddles stay or fade. Two symbiotes reach for each other and can be ripped apart. Every part of how it looks and moves is in its own Symbiote tab, and every number can be keyed or linked to a signal.
• Fluid morph. A shape melts into another like a living goo, and the outline follows the moving surface.
• Nodes as text. Any node network can be written as a few readable lines and read back, so you can write networks by hand or with a code helper.
• A welcome page and a tour. What RICO does, what people make with it, and a two-minute tour of every part. Hover any button for what it does, its shortcut and a link to read more.
• Interface size. Fit your screen, or pick your own size, in File > Settings.
• Output windows. Send Motion to a projector and pin its corners onto a surface. Soft edges for two projectors.
• Other screens. Open RICO on a tablet or a second computer and share changes live. Save everything as one .ricoproject, or start from a starter project.
• Scripts for any protocol. A script panel can open UDP, TCP and serial ports, send OSC anywhere and make its own controls. It travels inside the workspace file. See docs/SCRIPTS.md.
• Your colors, your shortcuts. Six color themes or your own five colors. Any command can run from a key, a MIDI pad, an OSC button or the kick drum.
• Open Media Transport (OMT). Open source network video, built in.
• NDI as a plugin. If you have NDI Tools installed, drop in the plugin and RICO uses it. If not, RICO runs exactly the same without it.
• Virtual MIDI ports with Windows MIDI Services. No extra drivers.
• Setups for 3D apps. Step by step for Blender, Unreal Engine, Maya, Houdini, TouchDesigner and Unity, with small scripts for the apps that don't speak OSC by themselves (see integrations/).
• Portable. Settings live in a data folder next to RICO.exe, so RICO runs from a USB stick. Nothing needs the internet.

Download

Get the latest version from Releases. Unzip it anywhere, also on a USB stick, and open RICO.exe.

RICO needs Windows 10 or 11. Some parts need a little more:

• New interface: Microsoft Edge WebView2. Windows 11 has it already.
• Virtual MIDI ports: Windows 11 with Windows MIDI Services.
• NDI: NDI Tools installed, and rico-ndi.dll in the plugins folder.

When something is missing, RICO tells you what and keeps working with the rest.

Build it yourself

You need Visual Studio 2022 with "Desktop development with C++", CMake, vcpkg and Node.js.

git clone https://github.com/mayakhalil-cmd/RICO-Engine.git
cd RICO-Engine
cmake --preset windows
cmake --build --preset release

RICO ends up in build\RICO\, ready to copy anywhere. The Teletactile title font is not in the repository; put Teletactile.ttf in ui/public/fonts/ before you build, or RICO uses Courier Prime for titles. The full guide, with the problems people usually run into, is in docs/BUILDING.md.

Folder guide

Folder	What is inside
app/	The engine: MIDI, OSC, video, audio, DMX, MQTT, and the classic interface
ui/	The new interface (TypeScript and WebGL)
include/rico/	The plugin API, plain C
plugins/ndi/	The NDI plugin
integrations/	Small scripts for Blender, Maya and Houdini
third_party/	The open source code RICO is built on
docs/	Building, testing, plugins and ideas for showcases
tools/	Icon maker and other helpers

Learn the interface

docs/WORKSPACES.md is a tour of workspaces, routes, nodes, the timeline, 3D, output windows and projects.

Write a script

A protocol RICO does not speak yet is a few lines of JavaScript away. Read docs/SCRIPTS.md.

Make a plugin

Video transports are plugins: a DLL with two C functions. NDI is built this way, and you can add others. Read docs/PLUGINS.md.

License

RICO Engine is free and open source under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later (AGPL-3.0). This covers every version of RICO Engine, including earlier releases and the beta.

• Use it for anything, including paid performances, installations, shows and client work. What you make with RICO is yours; the license does not cover it.
• If you share RICO, or a changed copy of it, you share its full source code under the same license.
• If you run a changed copy for other people over a network (as a web app, a hosted service or a remote control page), you offer them its source code too.
• Tools and patches that only talk to RICO over OSC, MIDI, DMX, MQTT, Spout or network video are separate works and can use any license.

LICENSE-EXCEPTIONS.md adds one permission: the optional NDI plugin may load the NDI runtime, which has its own license. The name RICO and the RICO logo are not covered by the license; see LICENSE-EXCEPTIONS.md.

The projects RICO is built on keep their own licenses, listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

NDI(R) is a registered trademark of Vizrt NDI AB. RICO is not affiliated with Vizrt or NDI.

Made by Maya Khalil.