A Blender add-on for generating seamlessly looping animated gradient backgrounds for websites — with a control panel in the 3D viewport, a preset library, film-grain emulation, and WCAG contrast checking.
Built and tested against Blender 4.5 LTS.
- Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install…
- Pick
wave_texture_maker.py - Enable Wave Texture Maker
- In the 3D viewport press
N→ Wave Tex tab → Set Up Scene
Three renderers share one colour, effects and export stack. The panel only shows the controls belonging to the active pipeline.
Aura Flow — domain-warped fBm. Noise bends its own sample coordinates twice before the colour lookup, producing large soft organic blobs. This is the one to use for modern mesh-gradient backgrounds; a wave texture can only make bands.
Wave Gradient — the original procedural wave. Directional bands, water or ripple profile.
Iridescent Film — actual physics. A spectral gravity-capillary wave solver
(Tessendorf-style, wavetex_physics.py) drives film thickness, and colour comes
from the Airy reflectance of a thin film integrated against the CIE 1931 colour
matching functions. The rainbow is computed, not painted.
Everything loops exactly, by construction rather than by crossfade.
- Aura: each warp layer samples along a circular path, so one phase cycle returns to its starting coordinate. Layers orbit at different radii, so the field morphs instead of sliding.
- Iridescent: every Fourier mode is snapped to an integer multiple of the loop frequency, so each completes a whole number of cycles over the loop.
Measured closure is within one 8-bit step.
Grain is modelled rather than pasted on:
- spatial correlation is imposed in the frequency domain, which also makes the tile exactly periodic so it wraps with no seam
- the blue-sensitive dye layer is the coarsest, as in real colour negative
- amplitude follows a density curve peaking in the midtones — grain is added in linear light, and the display transform expands shadows steeply, so a flat amplitude gets hammered in the darks
- enlargement is a separate control: a smaller negative is blown up more to reach the same frame, which is why 16mm looks grainier than 35mm
Stocks: 35mm Fine / Standard / Pushed, 16mm, Super 8, B&W 400.
Six pattern types, each with cell size, screen angle and per-channel colour separation — the controls that decide whether a gradient reads as printed matter or as a computer artefact.
| Mode | Character |
|---|---|
| Blue Noise | low frequencies removed, so it reads as texture not dirt — the default |
| White Noise | plain random, grittier |
| Ordered (Bayer) | crosshatch grid, selectable matrix order |
| Halftone Dots | clustered dots growing from each cell, like print |
| Line Screen | parallel lines — engraving, risograph |
| Crosshatch | two crossed line screens |
Two details that matter:
- Cell size decides the whole register. At 1px it is invisible anti-banding; at 4–12px the pattern becomes the look.
- Colour separation gives each channel its own screen angle (15°/75°/0°, as in four-colour print). This is what stops the dots stacking into a moire and gives halftones their colour life.
Periodic screens are clamped to a 2px minimum cell — a cosine screen with a one-pixel period samples the same phase at every pixel and collapses to a flat field.
- Palette from a seed with colour-harmony rules, or from your own brand colours blended through OKLab (linear RGB drags mid-stops toward grey)
- Colour zones — quantise the field into flat territories that take palette colours verbatim, then soften the edges. Interpolating first and posterising after produces muddy mid-hues
- Balance Zones — measures the field's histogram and flattens it so every palette colour actually gets area. Blender's noise clusters around 0.5, so uniform quantiser buckets silently starve the outer zones
- Contrast check — samples the render and reports worst-case WCAG ratio against your text colour
- Scrim, tone range, edge fade for keeping a background under readable copy
- Web export with a poster frame and a handoff snippet
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
wave_texture_maker.py |
the add-on |
wavetex_physics.py |
wave solver and thin-film reflectance, standalone/testable |
wave_texture_maker.blend |
working scene |
Rendered frames and baked simulation caches are gitignored — the add-on regenerates them.
Aura Flow pipeline, three-tone harmony, 35mm Standard grain, 1920x1080.