Slope Operator | TiXL | Page 1

oak gulch Feb 27, 2026, 2:11 AM

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I've been following lots of TD tutorials and translating into TiXL ops, and there is a lot of overlap in operators which has made it a great learning experience!

There is an operator that keeps coming up which I think would be quite useful in TiXL, which is 'Slope' - it is quite a simple shader which returns the derivative of a texture.

https://docs.derivative.ca/Slope_TOP

I think that it works out to 0.5 + (current pixel - neighbour)/2

Slope is used quite often in tutorials for flow fields and displacement feedback as a sort of directional blur to make the underlying noise smoother without using a box blur and losing some of the detail.

Derivative

Slope TOP

The Slope TOP generates pixels that represent the difference between its value and its neighbouring pixels' values.

past sluice Feb 28, 2026, 1:31 AM

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Wouldn't this be [NormalMap] ?

oak gulch Mar 1, 2026, 3:05 AM

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Ah I see - I assumed that it was different to [NormalMap] because of the greyscale output from Slope, but yes it is the same thing. Thank you!

Please feel free to delete the request and hide my ignorance 🫣

past sluice Mar 1, 2026, 9:51 AM

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The [NormalMap] has a mode parameter that can also return a signed result.

#Slope Operator