ZHiCK Glitch
Drop it on — it's already moving. One slider does the rest
01What it does
- Drop it on — it animates itself, with no keyframes to place
- Six looks that fill in the controls, so you can see what they did
- A pixel sort that really sorts — exact runs, no approximation
- Outputs a displacement map, so the rest of your comp tears with it
02A closer look
One slider, and it moves on its own.
Most glitch work is a pile of noise nodes, expressions and keyframes that has to be rebuilt on the next shot. This is one node with one control at the top. Amount is what you keyframe when you want the corruption to arrive and leave. Everything else is there when you want to shape it and folded away when you do not. The pattern changes every frame by itself — including over a frozen frame, which is where a lot of glitch work actually happens.
Six looks, and they show their work.
Subtle, VHS, Datamosh, Digital, Cyberpunk and Sorted. Pick one and the controls below fill in with the values that look is made of. Nothing hides behind the menu. A preset here is a starting point you can take apart, not a mode you are stuck inside — so the second shot is a tweak instead of a rebuild.
The pixel sort is a real sort.
Ordering pixels by brightness inside short runs is the streaky glitch-art look. It is awkward to do exactly, because a single pixel cannot see where it belongs in its own run without looking at all of them. This sorts each run once, exactly, so the streaks keep their gradients instead of collapsing into flat bands — and the run length is not capped. Sorting runs along rows or columns, in either direction, and a threshold keeps the shadows in place so the image underneath stays readable.
The tear can drive the rest of the shot.
Set Output to Displacement and you get the warp itself, written into red and green with 0.5 as neutral. Feed that to an IDistort or STMap and other layers tear with the same motion. That is the difference between a glitch sitting on top of a shot and something the shot is doing. There is a matte output too — white wherever the frame is being corrupted this frame — for driving a glow or a defocus off the same event.
Built for Nuke. Resolve is a bonus.
Z_Glitch was written for Nuke and that is where it belongs: it stays out of the way while you work, and renders without you thinking about it. It also loads in DaVinci Resolve, and everything works there — the same effect, the same controls, the same result. One thing is worth knowing before you buy: it runs on the CPU, not the graphics card. In Nuke you are rendering to disk, so that is not something you feel. In Resolve you are watching a timeline play back, and there it shows — HD plays live on a modern multi-core machine, 4K does not, and you will want to cache or render the clip rather than scrub it. Nothing is missing in Resolve. It simply is not a real-time 4K effect there, and we would rather you knew that now than found out after paying.
03Specifications
- Runs in
- Nuke · DaVinci Resolve
- Category
- Stylize
- OFX API
- 1.5
- Contexts
- Filter · General
- Bit depths
- 8-bit · 16-bit · 32-bit float
- Channels
- RGB · RGBA
- GPU acceleration
- CPU, multi-threaded
- Vendor
- ZHiCK
04The 7-day trial
The trial is the complete plugin — every control, your own footage, no features held back. One trial per machine.
When it ends the plugin keeps loading and keeps rendering the full effect, with a faint ZHiCK STUDIO watermark across the output. It does not vanish from the node list or fail a render: a licensing problem found at 2am should cost an obviously marked frame, never a farm job. Nothing about the paid version differs except the watermark.
05Installing it
ZHiCK Hub installs and updates the plugin for you, and is how the trial is issued. If you would rather not run it, the plugin is a folder you copy into the host's plugin path.
06Version history
- 1.1
8 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
Corrects the licence agreement that ships inside the plugin. 1.0 carried a draft that offered a refund the shop does not give. The plugin binary is unchanged from 1.0.
- 1.0
8 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
07Still deciding?
Ask me anything about it — whether it fits your shot, your host version, or your pipeline. I built it for my own work, so the answer is usually specific.
zhickstudio@gmail.com