Lacework A dark field of stitches — dots that morph into crosses as a radial wave passes through them, lit by four drifting glow blobs and tinted by angle into a faint rainbow.
150 background shaders · dark, glowing, re-themeable. Each tile is live WebGL — pick a theme to recolour them all, copy the GLSL to take one.
Loom
Tatting A fine halftone field of pure round dots, like knotted tatted lace. Concentric ripples wash outward and each dot swells and brightens on the passing wavefront, shrinking back to a pinprick between crests.
Sampler A cross-stitch sampler: an all-over lattice of little X marks bowed by a slow woven distortion, the stitches lengthening and brightening as radial waves pass through them.
Eyelet A field of hollow ring marks, like the punched eyelet holes of broderie-anglaise lace. A radial wave pumps each ring's radius so the eyelets breathe open and closed as the wavefront passes.
Herringbone A woven cloth of short oriented dashes that lean one way on one row and the other way on the next, building the classic herringbone chevron. Radial waves run diagonal bands of brightness across the weave.
Seersucker Several travelling wave sources radiate at once and their phases sum into shifting standing-wave bands, like crinkled seersucker cloth. A fine dot grid samples that interference, the dots swelling on the crests and sinking in the troughs.
Tulle A fine net of lace dots bent by a perspective fall-off and a soft swirl, the marks bunching and shrinking toward a fold the way a sheet of tulle netting hangs and recedes into depth, a radial wave still washing through.
Current
Warp A loom's warp — thin bright vertical threads on a near-black field that ripple side to side as a slow sinusoidal wave travels down them, with soft glow nodes blooming where a sweeping horizontal weft crosses, tinted across the palette by thread position.
Carrier A rack of horizontal waveform traces, each a thin phosphor line with a soft glow halo, displaced by exact sums of sinusoids. Channels scroll laterally at a steady reading pace while slow envelopes swell, frequencies glide, and beats walk — patient radio traffic after midnight, ruled and precise, looping on a shared ~60s super-period.
Warp Current A Warp variation: a whole warp of fine fibres combed into a flowing current. Hundreds of thin bright threads sweep across the frame, bent by a shared domain-warped flow so they gather and part like silk under water, taking palette hues by flow angle and bunching into luminous off-centre bands. Two parallaxing depth layers of fibre.
Lyre A rack of plucked strings, fixed top and bottom, vibrating in standing-wave harmonics — one hums in its fundamental, its neighbour in the second mode with a still node at its waist, the next in the third. Each string is plucked, swells and rings down, then is plucked again, the antinodes glowing brightest where the string swings widest and the nodes holding dark and still. A warp of vertical threads given the voice of carrier's signal.
Relay A loom of fibre-optic strands carrying light. Thin dim fibres run the height of the frame and bright pulses race along them like data down glass, each a sharp head trailing a glowing comet tail. Every strand runs at its own speed and direction so the traffic is asynchronous — some pulses climbing, some falling — the strands lit in palette hues. Where carrier carried a waveform in the shape of the line, relay carries light travelling along a straight thread.
Heddle A warp under the loom's hand. Fine vertical threads are gathered into bright pleats and drawn apart into dark sheds — a smocking gather crowds the threads where it pinches and opens them where it releases, the gather lines wavering down the height and travelling slowly sideways so the pleats breathe open and shut. Threads crowd luminous at the folds and thin into shadow between. A warp like warp's, gathered into pleats instead of rippled.
Guilloche
Guilloche A banknote border band of fine taut strands woven over-under into a continuous machined braid of lozenges on near-black steel; the pattern never moves — only its phase travels longitudinally so the braid perpetually re-weaves, and the only light is specular sparks where strands cross.
Braid A wall of vertical plaits. In each column thick luminous cords weave over and under in a repeating interlace, the strand nearest the viewer riding bright and fat in front while the others pass behind, the whole braid travelling slowly downward so the crossings march down the frame. Columns tile edge to edge, each cord a palette hue — bold and heavily woven.
Helix Strands of glowing line wound into double helices that lean across the frame, each strand phase-offset from its partners so they weave over and under into an engine-turned lattice. The strand riding forward glows brighter than the one passing behind, so the flat sinusoids twist into cable; a charge pulse streams along every line and slim ladder rungs tie the paired strands. Hue turns slowly down the length, the whole rack looping on a steady pace.
Weave
Weft A woven cloth seen close. Bright vertical warp threads and horizontal weft threads interlace in a plain tabby weave — at every crossing one rides over and the other dips under, in the checkerboard the loom makes. A soft sheen sweeps diagonally so the raised threads glint as light crosses the cloth, threads tinted by position, the whole weave breathing with a slow ripple. A direct sibling of warp, where the weft is now real interlaced thread.
Hatch Weave A Hatch variation: the diagonal crosshatch stands upright into axis-aligned warp and weft threads that interlace over-under like real cloth, with a coarse colour sett running along each axis so the field reads as a woven tartan plaid. Warp and weft take two different palette yarns while the same drifting ghost field modulates thread weight, so the tonal gradient reads as light and shade falling across fabric.
Tartan A dark tartan sett woven from light: translucent warp bands running vertical and weft bands running horizontal, crossing in an over-under weave so the overlaps brighten and whichever thread rides on top alternates square by square. The stripe recipe repeats across the frame and a slow shimmer breathes through it, colour following the band groups. Crossing bands of light, never filled cells.
Strand
Plexus A loose constellation of glow-dot nodes hung across the dark, each slowly circling its own anchor, now stacked into depth layers that recede back-to-front — finer, dimmer and softer behind so the web reads as a volume rather than a wallpaper. Hairline threads glow in between nodes that drift within reach, their colour running from one end's hue to the other, and faint triangle ghosts settle behind clustered triples. Connections form and dissolve by proximity while a barely-there wave breathes diagonally across the net.
Cradle Anchored string art: a ring of bright cradle-point anchors sits right on the screen edges, and from each anchor a fan of chords is strung to its neighbours k steps away. The overlapping chord families trace smooth glowing envelope curves - the cardioid, nephroid and rose shapes of classic string art - with glint beads sliding the strings and the anchor nodes burning brightest. The whole figure breathes and slowly re-strings itself.
Harmonia Modular times-table string art: points spaced evenly round a circle, each strung with a straight chord to the point at its multiple. The crowd of chords traces the envelope curves hidden in the times tables - the cardioid, the nephroid, the higher roses - and as the multiplier slowly breathes the whole figure morphs from one curve into the next. Every strand is dead straight; the glowing curves are only the shapes their tangents draw.
Plait A woven braid of glowing cords runs the width of the frame. Each strand weaves up and down on a phase-shifted sine, so neighbours cross over and under one another like a plaited rope; at every crossing the rising strand rides in front and the one behind dips into shadow, giving a real over-under depth. The whole braid drifts slowly sideways while the palette runs hue to hue across the bundle.
Funnelweb A funnel-weaver web wound into a vortex: two counter-winding families of logarithmic-spiral threads cross into a swirling web that coils down toward an off-centre throat, faint radial spokes tying the arms together. The threads crowd as they near the throat and the whole figure drifts slowly inward, so the web seems to spin away down the funnel while the depths sink to black.
Gauze A node network seen through a shallow depth of field. Glow nodes are scattered through depth and linked by hairline threads, but only those near the focal plane resolve to sharp points - the nearer and farther ones swell into soft out-of-focus bokeh discs, big and faint with their light spread thin. The focal plane racks slowly back and forth so the whole web breathes in and out of focus, strands sharpening as others bloom into haze.
Seine A drift-net billowing in a slow current: a square mesh of cords spans the whole frame, each knot tied to its grid neighbours, while a rolling flow field pushes the net into sagging swells - it bellies toward you and falls away, the near folds brightening as the far ones sink into shadow. The topology is fixed, a true net rather than chance proximity, so it always reads as one continuous web drifting underwater.
Tousle A full-frame field of fine threads combed roughly level but interweaving: each thread wanders by close to a whole row-spacing so neighbours cross and tousle into a dense luminous hank that fills the frame edge to edge. Light runs along the strands and the whole combed field drifts on a slow diagonal. Open crossing strands, never closed cells.
Veil
Triad Three standing plane-wave trains cross at 120 degrees and sum into a honeycomb of glowing antinode cells on a vibrating bronze pan. Hash-scheduled strikes flood the lattice with shimmering amplitude that rings down at three different rates, melting the hexagons through stripe-dominant interludes before settling to a faint residual.
Drape Heavy silk fills the frame in smooth vertical folds, lit with analytic normals so every crest carries a luminous specular sheen while valleys fall to near-black. Crest highlights blend the palette by horizontal position so neighbouring folds glow in different restrained hues, and the cloth sways slowly as if hung at an open window.
Pleat Crisp accordion-pleated fabric folds the frame into flat-shaded panels divided by hard crease lines, while a broad band of light rolls horizontally across the cloth and the creases bow and lean on slow sines.
Billow A continuous sheet of cloth seen from above, billowing over moving air: two slow travelling wave-trains cross the frame at a shallow diagonal, summed with soft FBM and shaded by analytic normals so every wavefront carries a moving ridge of sheen with dark troughs between. Palette hues grade across the frame so successive crests catch subtly different colours — one unbroken shaded surface that rolls open-endedly with no loop seam.
Sheen Two layers of sheer woven gauze lie over a dark field, one rotated a hair and sliding against the other so their fine thread grids beat into broad luminous moiré fringes — soft curving rivers of tinted interference, with no light source anywhere. Inside each bright fringe the micro-weave resolves into visible threads, and successive fringe orders take different palette hues. The upper gauze drifts and minutely rotates on slow incommensurate sines, so the whole pattern continuously sweeps and re-spaces itself.
Brume Moonlit mist streams sideways through a dark colonnade: near-black vertical columns silhouetted against a luminous FBM fog that glows brightest in the gaps, each window framing a slightly different drifting colour.
Fan Pleated cloth fanned around a pivot just below the frame: the folds radiate outward, narrow and converging near the pivot and opening into broad wedges toward the top, like a folding hand-fan or a sunburst-pleated skirt. Each wedge is flat-shaded into a lit plane and a shadow plane split by a luminous radial crease, and a broad band of light sweeps angularly across the fan, handing brightness wedge to wedge while the pleats ripple and breathe. A radial sibling of Pleat's straight vertical accordion.
Portiere Two sheer curtain panels meeting down the middle, each gathered into vertical folds that sway and fan toward the outer edges. The folds are translucent ridges of glow drawn over near-black, breathing gently on a slow loop and hanging with a scalloped hem. A hung doorway curtain caught in a doorway draft.
Wake
Undertow Concentric ripples from three drifting sources interfere into a standing wave field, rendered as glowing contour bands over a deep dark base and tinted by phase and position into a restrained rainbow.
Marble Suminagashi paper-marbling: two inks from opposite ends of the palette interleave as thin luminous filaments on a near-black ground, folding into hooked swirls as a drifting domain warp perpetually stretches and refolds the sheet — ink combed on water that never settles and never resets.
Stone Agate cross-section: the marbling field read as dense, nearly concentric mineral bands — filled slabs of deep palette colour cycling hue band-by-band like layered geology, parted by thin luminous fortification seams. A very slow settling drift keeps the slab perpetually growing and re-layering, banded stone lit from within.
Oil Iridescent oil on dark water: a drifting film whose thickness maps through interference orders into soft spectral sheen, so broad concentric zones of teal, magenta and gold flex slowly across the frame. A restrained rainbow that only ever cycles the theme colours, brightest along the constructive-interference fringes and never the same shape twice.
Roil A turbulent current of dense fine fibres advected through a churning field — curl-noise plus a handful of slowly orbiting vortices wind the threads into spiralling eddies that wind up, shear apart and reform. Colour follows the local flow direction so opposing swirls glow in different palette hues, with two parallaxing depth layers churning at different rates. The chaotic cousin of the combed warp-current.
Fray Combed, then released. Diagonal fibres run sleek and parallel where a comb has just passed and fray into domain-warped chaos in the length they have not yet reached. A bright comb stroke sweeps along the fibres over and over, re-ordering the weave behind it and leaving it to unravel ahead, so the whole field breathes order into chaos and back. Two parallax depth layers fray at different rates.
Aether
Welkin Raymarched volumetric cumulus over a generic ground plane: the view ray is marched through a real cloud layer sampling a 3D density field with a cumulus height-profile, self-shadowed by a secondary march toward the sun, so the clouds have rounded billowing tops, flat bases, dark cores and silver-lit backlit edges. A free camera flies from the ground up through the deck and high above it, and the controls shape the weather from a clear day to towering thunderheads.
Abyss
Starfall A deep drifting starfield — three parallax layers of hash-placed stars raining down on a diagonal, each twinkling on its own phase, the brightest tinted from the palette, over a faint breathing nebula wash.
Corona An absolute-black void disc betrayed only by its rim: dozens of curved hairline filaments hugging the circumference like corona discharge at an eclipse's edge, drifting slowly around the circuit while each streak flickers on its own phase — and at long intervals one erupts into a streamer that detaches and dissolves into the dark.
Gloaming Blue hour deepening to night across the whole frame: a warm-to-indigo horizon glow fades and cools as fixed stars blink on one by one, until full night holds and a faint dawn tint rises to rinse them away. One imperceptibly slow closed colour cycle; nothing translates, all motion is luminance and hue.
Halo Total solar eclipse: a dark occulting moon hangs high against a slow-twinkling starfield while a bright corona blazes around its limb, its edge frayed by ridged noise into the filamental streamers and prominences of a real eclipse. A thin warm chromosphere rings the limb and a diamond-ring point flares at one side. The corona crawls slowly around the disc, the radius breathes, and the streamers shimmer — all very slow, nothing that resets.
Nebula Drift A Nebula variation seen edge-on: a deep volumetric emission field of drifting palette-hued gas, threaded by serpentine dark dust lanes and Bok globules that silhouette against the backlight, and laced with thin bright ionization filaments. Two parallaxing depth layers and an off-centre luminous heart give real front-to-back depth.
Mosaic
Crackle A static two-scale fracture web over a deep, slow-creeping aurora — no crack is ever drawn. Each shard refracts the colour field through its own slowly wandering offset and tilt, so hue and brightness jump cleanly at every seam while fine crazing shears the gradient in miniature inside each shard.
Vein Only the seams of a voronoi partition — thin capillary lines on a near-black field that continuously rewire: edges fade in along their length, dock into junctions with a soft glint, stand a while, then thin and retract, each seam tinted by its two neighbouring cells.
Caustic The pool-bottom light net: two jittered Voronoi cell layers multiply into a sharp filament web with hot knots where lines cross, on near-black ground. The layers shear and each cell's jitter point orbits slowly, so the net fattens, thins and rewires continuously while the four palette colours read as regional tints.
Geode A druzy crystal bed wall to wall: small angular Voronoi facets in cold dim mineral tones, the faintest line tracing each edge. Individual facets fire sharp specular glints on independent timers — a fast attack, a slow afterglow — only a handful alive at once, scattered like moonlight on quartz.
Hex
Comb A strict honeycomb of flat hexagonal cells lit from within by a slow-drifting light field — bright clusters of warm comb shade off into dim neighbours across thin dark wax walls, while a few vacated chambers sit dark and re-light over long staggered periods.
Hive A honeycomb of glowing hexagonal tubes filling the frame edge to edge, with charge chasing around each cell rim and the hue drifting cell to cell. The outlines glow over a softly lit ground so the whole comb reads as one lit network.
Honeycomb A beveled hexagonal grid catching light — chamfered cells with lit and shadowed edges, a glow travelling cell to cell through the comb while the rest sit in cool shadow. Confident hard-edged geometry with a premium machined feel.
Rosette
Iris A giant eye iris filling the frame: hundreds of fine radial fibers run from a dark central pupil out past the corners, each wiggling slightly off a true radius. Fiber colour blends through the palette by angle, with a brighter collarette ring partway out and soft limbal darkening toward the far field. The pupil dilates and contracts on a long sinusoidal breath while fibers stretch radially to follow the moving aperture — the central negative space is the protagonist.
Iris Bloom A flower iris filling the frame: overlapping teardrop petal lobes whorl out of a dark central core in three offset, interleaving rings, the way a dahlia packs its bloom. Each petal has a luminous spine and a tapering tip; colour blends cyclically through the palette by angle while the whole bloom opens and closes on a slow breath, the core a dark protagonist with a glowing rim.
Iris Burst A starburst iris filling the frame: where the base iris has a dark pupil, burst inverts it into a hot near-white core that throws long thin sharp rays out past the corners. A few dominant spikes dominate among many fine ones like a lens star, each twinkling on its own phase, colour saturating from white at the core to hue along the rays.
Iris Aperture A mechanical-diaphragm iris filling the frame: hard straight-edged camera blades overlap into a spiralling polygon and open and close on a slow breath. The leading edges form an N-gon aperture at the centre, the dark protagonist; each blade face is a faintly graded metal leaf with a luminous machined edge where it laps the next, colour flowing through the palette by angle as a cool metallic wash.
Iris Fila A filament-halo iris filling the frame: hundreds of hair-thin luminous strands radiate from a soft glowing core, each with a hashed length so the field feathers like a nebula or a dandelion clock rather than reading as solid spokes. No hard pupil here, the centre blooms bright; the strands are brightest mid-field and feather into a faint halo at the edges, shimmering on per-strand phases.
Iris Ringed A banded iris filling the frame: the radial fibers are crossed by glowing concentric annular rings that ripple slowly outward from a dark pupil, the way a real iris is scored by furrows and a collarette. Fibers give the fine radial grain, the rings a travelling annular lattice that catches a brighter tint where it crosses a fiber; colour blends through the palette by angle, the pupil a dark protagonist with a luminous rim.
Iris Flare An off-centre solar-flare iris filling the frame: the radial pattern is anchored on a focal point pushed off-centre so the frame reads composed rather than as a lone centred disc. Wispy streamers erupt from a hot core like solar prominences, longer and brighter across the open side and shorter behind, all flickering on their own phases, with a broad warm glow so the far corners never go dead-black.
Strata
Dune A sand sea from directly above at night: long sinuous crest lines lit asymmetrically, a bright moonlit windward face falling off into a short dark slip face. The whole ridge system translates and reshapes downwind with geological patience.
Schist A slab of foliated metamorphic rock face-on: dense wavy mineral bands sweep diagonally across the frame, each layer a different restrained palette tint separated by thin dark cleavage seams, domain-warped into boudinage swells and pinches so it never reads as ruled stripes. Tiny mica flakes scattered along the foliation catch the light and twinkle. Dark rock, luminous mineral colour, everything creeping slowly with no loop seam.
Burnish
Kintsugi Gold-repaired pottery: a solid lit ceramic glaze surface laced with a natural, irregular crackle network - wandering cracks that branch and meet at random angles the way real crazed glaze does. The cracks are filled with crisp metallic gold rendered as a lit rounded lacquer ridge, and the glaze between them carries its own shifting tone, soft sheen and iron speckle.
Hatch A full-bleed crosshatch engraving whose line weight is carved by an invisible drifting FBM plume, so density alone reads as the tonal shading of smoke that is never drawn. The hatching never moves; a low raking light precesses across the static engraving like a coin tilted under lamplight.
Damask A brocade wallpaper of mirror-symmetric foliate medallions on a half-drop repeat. Each cell folds a noise field through an N-fold dihedral kaleidoscope into an ornate, perfectly symmetric motif; the deep jewel ground carries the pattern tone-on-tone like real damask while gold filigree outlines the ornament. Lit evenly across the whole frame, no dark midriff.
Hatch Contour A Hatch variation: the whole crosshatch lattice is domain-warped along the drifting ghost field, so every burin stroke bends and flows around the hidden form like the curved lines of a wood engraving or a topographic map. Line curvature and tonal density agree, so the strokes wrap the volume and read as rounded relief rather than a flat screen.
Quintet Five standing plane-wave trains cross at 72 degrees and sum into a decagonal quasicrystal, rendered as luminous iso-contours: nested rings around every interference centre interlock into the pentagon and ten-pointed-star tiling of a pattern that never quite repeats, an ornate woven brocade of glowing thread. The contour hue cycles by field level so each ring shimmers a different colour. Hash-scheduled strikes flood all five voices and they ring down at five separate rates, so the whole weave flares on a strike and recedes between blows while the phases slowly breathe. A five-voice sibling of Triad's three-train honeycomb.
Filament
Fret A living labyrinth: a Truchet weave of quarter-turn paths connects edge to edge into one continuous meander that fills the whole frame, no empty centre and no border band. The paths glow in slowly shifting palette hues while bright currents of light course along them like charge running through a circuit.
Trellis An orthogonal grid of glowing conduits with a bright pad lit at every junction, like a printed circuit board carrying charge along its traces. The current runs the nearer axis of each crossing so the whole lattice reads as one routed network over a softly lit ground.
Argyle Two families of diagonal glowing tubes cross into a diamond weave, one riding brighter over the other so the lattice reads as woven luminous cord. Charge travels each diagonal and the hue shifts diamond to diamond over a softly lit ground.
Gasket Concentric glowing rings crossed by radial spokes, like a circular LED grid or a luminous manhole cover. Charge pulses outward through the rings while the hue turns with radius and angle, all over a softly lit ground.
Skein Rows of horizontal glowing tubes undulate across the frame like a hank of ribbon cable, each row on its own sine and its own hue. Charge streams along the cables, alternate rows running opposite ways, over a softly lit ground.
Volute A glowing tube wound into a spiral that fills the frame, charge spinning outward along the coil while the hue turns with each revolution. One arm or several over a softly lit ground.
Spoke A starburst of glowing tubes radiating from the centre, charge shooting outward along each ray while the hue steps spoke to spoke. A softly lit ground fills the wedges between.
Delve
Nautilus The cross-section of a chambered shell seen straight down the whorl: grand annular chambers flooded with pearly light compress septum by septum into a black focal depth, while one bright siphuncle channel pierces every wall at a single fixed angle. The vessel sinks forever along the scale axis — nothing rotates, nothing translates.
Throat An ice-cave throat swallowing the view: concentric shelves of translucent ice with organic noise-displaced contours, cold rim light pooling in the bays, hue sliding through the palette by depth, and an exponential gullet of true black at center. Shelves and their frozen wobble descend the scale axis forever — a continuous zoom that never arrives.
Lode A mine shaft sunk through ore-bearing rock, seen straight down the bore. Near-black FBM stone walls salted with tiny hash-scattered mineral glints, a few glowing ore veins threading the rock, and one warm waist of light — a stationary lamp band at fixed screen radius. The wall pours perpetually down the scale axis through the lamp toward a true-black focal depth at the centre.
Adit An off-axis glance down a timbered mine gallery: the black vanishing depth pinned in the lower-right third while sheared trapezoidal support frames - two posts and a cap beam - recede forever into it in an exponential scale series, each hung with one warm lamp. A pair of glowing rails crossed by dim sleepers converges on the same depth. Frames, rails and lamps all shrink away down the scale axis, the log-periodic wrap hidden under the edge fade at birth and the fog at death.
Mercury
Wax A lava lamp without the lamp: a dark liquid pool clings to the bottom of the frame while two or three molten wax bodies pinch off it, rise through the column with a bright snap, stall, and reluctantly sink back to be reabsorbed.
Plinth
Stele A memorial field of flat-topped slabs on a strict grid, raymarched from a high eye tilted steeply down: rank on rank of dim lit rectangles converge into haze while the camera glides diagonally across the field, dark mist pooling in the alleys and rare slabs carrying a glowing inscribed seam.
Menhir A plain of scattered standing stones receding into luminous haze, raymarched as true 3D solids: tapered, slightly leaning prisms strewn across a jittered field while the camera dollies forward down a sinuous cleared lane, near menhirs sweeping past in parallax as far ones dissolve into a glowing horizon band, each stone edged with a thin rim of light where it meets the fog behind it.
Ziggurat One colossal raymarched stepped pyramid stands alone on a dark plain, terrace lips catching a knife-thin rim of light and a warm beacon burning at the summit. The camera rides a slow level orbit so near terraces slide across far ones in parallax while ground haze breathes around the base.
Dolmen A single raymarched trilithon - two thick uprights bearing a tilted capstone - eclipses a broad setting glow on the horizon, with recumbent stones layered behind it and ground fog drifting at shin height. The camera traces a very slow wide orbit so the bright portal gap opens, narrows to a sliver as an upright eclipses the light, and opens again, a minutes-long eclipse cycle written purely by parallax.
Colossus Two colossal seated figures flank a narrow defile, abstracted to stacked stone primitives and mirrored across the path, with further pairs receding into altitude haze. A raymarched 3D solid scene where the camera cranes vertically — rising from among the knees until the faces emerge from the fog overhead, then settling on a long sinusoidal cycle. A faint rim catches where mass meets brighter fog; an ember glows in the crevice where each figure meets its plinth.
Obelisk A single tapering needle crowned by a pyramidion rises alone out of a rolling sea of fog under an empty near-black sky. The camera rides a slow helical orbit, fog dropping away to reveal the shaft on the rise and climbing back over its base on the descent while the monument stands utterly still.
Smolder
Char The creeping burn-front mapped onto a slowly turning globe: an irregular incandescent terminator sweeps across the sphere's surface, graded hot-to-cool through the palette across its width, leaving a charred hemisphere veined with a glowing ember-crack network and salted with cooling sparks. Virgin surface ahead is dark, lit by a key light and cool rim so the form reads in 3D; the char is painted in object space so it turns with the globe. Staggered burns crossfade while featureless so the consumption never resets.
Heartwood The sawn end of a log: warm concentric growth rings and radial grain around an off-centre pith, with fire eating inward from the bark as a wandering annular ember rim graded warm-to-cool. Rings light as hairline preheat circles a beat before they burn; outside is ash with cooling sparks. The rim tightens to the pith and dies as a fresh face is already burning in.
Wildfire An emission nebula seen deep-field: luminous palette-tinted gas in pink and blue regions, threaded by dark dust lanes, with two or three ragged expanding ionization shells lit warm-to-cool across their stroke and beaded with brighter star-forming knots. The interiors the shells have swept read as denser glowing cloud, and a twinkling multi-layer starfield sits over it all, the brightest stars haloing into soft spikes.
Sough
Lea A meadow seen from directly above: a jittered grid of short grass-tuft strokes that lie near-black and almost still until an aperiodic gust band sweeps across, stretching and combing the tufts downwind so their far tips brighten — a travelling front of glowing dashes with calm dark meadow on either side.
Umbra
Louver A low off-screen lamp washes a plaster wall while the shadow of venetian blinds stripes it on a slight diagonal — bottom bars knife-sharp, top bars melting into grey breath as each slat hangs farther from the wall. The slats tilt on one long breathing cycle while the lamp drifts sideways, shearing and stretching the bars with no reset.
Aura
Slick An iridescent oil-slick color field — broad palette poles fold and churn through one another like thin film on water, thin-film bands sweeping slow rainbows across the surface. Pure soft color, no hard structure, dusted with film grain.
Bask A high-key warm color field — big soft blobs of peach, gold and coral drift over one another while a low dawn glow lifts from the bottom third like light through morning haze. Airy, bright, grainy; the antidote to dark backgrounds.
Welter A boiling warm color field — molten poles of rust, ember and amber rise and roll through one another with turbulent edges, hot cores glowing brighter as blobs merge. A grainy lava-lamp churn rather than a still gradient.
Suffuse A pastel wash that bleeds into itself — wide soft poles of opal blue, lilac, rose and mint drift so slowly they read as one suffused field, with a faint soap-bubble shimmer sweeping through. The softest, dreamiest member of the family.
Gloam A deep twilight color field — cool indigo and slate poles drift through near-black while one luminous pole blooms off-centre like the last light low in the sky. The dark anchor of the family: grainy, moody, glowing.
Haze A soft colour field quantised into stepped bands — a drifting haze posterised into discrete tones with a fine ordered-dither stipple softening the edges, like a low-bit gradient catching light. Calm, slightly retro, grainy.
Eddy A slow galactic swirl — colour poles smeared into spiral arms by a differential rotation that winds tighter toward a luminous off-centre core, inter-arm dust darkening between them. A drifting colour-field with a sense of rotation rather than a still gradient.
Loll A warm lit field with big soft shadows rolling slowly across it — like sunlight through drifting cloud, the brightest glow held off-centre while broad dark lobes sweep over and cool the tone as they pass. Calm, golden, unhurried.
Molten
Molten A cluster of liquid-chrome blobs merging and parting like mercury — raymarched 3D metal with mirror reflections of a palette-tinted studio environment, crisp specular highlights and grazing fresnel. Fills the frame as a close-up of flowing metal.
Frost A cluster of frosted-glass forms drifting and merging — raymarched 3D glass that refracts and reflects a soft palette-tinted environment, its surface scattering light into a milky translucence with a broad satin sheen. Reads as real rendered glass filling the frame.
Ingot A sheet of brushed metal catching the light — fine horizontal grooves scatter a broad anisotropic highlight that sweeps slowly across the surface, glinting along the brush lines. A close-up metal material rather than an object, filling the frame.
Bauble A single crystal ball filling the frame — a glass sphere refracting and reflecting a palette-tinted environment, its heart clouded with slow swirling smoke, a crisp studio highlight and a bright fresnel rim where the edge catches light. Reads as a real rendered glass orb.
Gild Interlocking metal rings turning slowly on three axes — raymarched gold tori with mirror reflections of a palette-tinted studio, crisp speculars and grazing fresnel. A premium polished-metal object filling the frame.
Rime A cluster of frosted ice spheres drifting in cold light — raymarched 3D ice that refracts the environment and glows from within with a soft subsurface luminance, brightest at the thin back-lit edges, finished with crisp glints. Crystalline and cold where Frost is milky.
Quench A sea of molten metal stretching to a horizon — a raymarched wavy surface that mirrors a hot forge sky, with emissive lava pooling in the troughs between cooling crests and sharp glints riding the swell. A flowing metal surface rather than an object.
Nacre A soap bubble caught in the light — a thin transparent film over a single sphere, swirling with thin-film interference colours that shift toward the rim and churn slowly across the surface, finished with a sharp highlight. Mostly see-through, all iridescence.
Moiré
Halftone A rotated print-screen of crisp dots whose size swells and shrinks with a drifting tone field — fat where the light pools, fine where it thins, tinted across the palette left to right. Clean, graphic, high-contrast.
Beat Two concentric ring patterns beating against each other — a slow moiré rosette blooming and folding as the centres drift apart, crisp bright bands threading through near-black. Pure interference, hypnotic and graphic.
Grille Two line gratings laid over one another at a slight angle — bold coloured bars beating into broad moiré fringes that sweep as the pair turns, bright welds flaring where the lines coincide. Crisp, kinetic, op-art.
Benday Pop-art Ben-Day dots — a regular screen of bold flat dots over a light newsprint ground, each dot taking its colour from a drifting field underneath so colour blocks roll across the grid. Bright, graphic, comic-book.
Dither An ordered Bayer dither over a slow folded gradient — chunky pixels stippling between a handful of palette levels the way an old indexed display would, the colour bands drifting and reshaping. Crisp, retro, low-bit.
Floret A sunflower spiral of crisp dots — seeds placed on the golden angle so they pack into the interlocking Fermat spirals of phyllotaxis, colour grading outward by radius while a brightness pulse travels through the rings as the whole head turns.
Ripple A grid of dots rippling like an LED matrix under water — concentric waves from two sources swell and shrink each dot as they pass and cross, crests brightening through the palette while troughs sink to near-black. Crisp, kinetic, rhythmic.
Tally An LED dot-matrix board running like a spectrum meter — columns of round LEDs bouncing to their own rhythm with peak-hold caps, lit dots grading cool-to-warm by height over a faint dark grid of off pixels. Crisp, rhythmic, electronic.
Facet
Stride Bold diagonal bars sliding across the frame, each a beveled ridge with a lit chamfer and shadowed trailing edge so they read as extruded 3D slats. Confident, architectural, kinetic.
Cubit A field of isometric cubes rising and falling like a block cityscape — each cube three shaded faces meeting at crisp seams, taller blocks catching more light. Confident hard-edged 3D geometry from flat shapes.
Chevron Beveled chevron ribbons scrolling upward — bold zigzag bands with lit crests and shadowed edges so they read as folded 3D ribbon, colour stepping band to band. Confident, rhythmic, architectural.
Relief A slowly morphing topographic relief — elevation shaded by hillshade so the terrain reads as carved, threaded with crisp contour lines and heavier index lines. A premium embossed map, geometry from a height field.
Rondel Concentric beveled rings broken into arcs that rotate against one another — each band a raised ring with lit and shadowed edges, segments counter-spinning ring to ring around an off-centre hub. Bold, kinetic, machined.
Lattice A neon wireframe grid rushing toward a glowing horizon, a banded sun sitting on the skyline — the classic perspective floor receding to a vanishing point, lines fading into the dark. Bold, retro, kinetic.
Parquet A floor of beveled rounded-rect planks, each pivoting ninety degrees on its own timer so the parquet endlessly re-lays itself — lit chamfers and shadowed edges giving every tile real depth. Crisp, kinetic, architectural.
Origami A sheet of folded paper rendered as a regular diagonal crease grid split into beveled triangular facets, each a flat shaded plane. A single raking light sweeps across so mountain and valley folds catch and surrender the light in turn, crisp highlights riding every crease. The pattern is a strict triangular fold grid, not a random tiling, so the whole sheet reads as one cleanly creased plane turning under the light — and an optional ripple can let it fold organically.
Glitch
Rupture A corrupted signal — blocky colour content torn into horizontal bands that jump and shuffle on discrete glitch frames, channels split into red/blue ghosts, bright scan tears and black dropouts flickering through. Digital, broken, kinetic.
Cathode An old CRT tube — colour test-bars scrolling behind a barrel-curved screen, fine scanlines and an RGB aperture-grille mask over everything, a vsync roll bar sweeping down and the picture flickering inside a dark bezel. Retro, electronic, alive.
Cipher Falling code rain — columns of flickering glyph cells streaming downward, each drop a bright leading character with a long fading trail, the symbols re-rolling as they fall. Classic terminal cascade in the palette's hue.
Matrix Digital rain — columns of glyphs cascading from the top, each stream led by a bright white shining character with a long trail fading from green to dark, the symbols re-rolling as they fall and columns running at their own speeds. The classic falling code.
ASCII A live ASCII terminal — a grid of character cells flickering their values, a diagonal read-out sweep lighting cells bright as it crosses and fading behind, the rest holding a dim amber standby. A console mid-computation, all text.
Glyphic A drifting image rendered in characters — each cell a glyph whose density tracks the brightness beneath it, so soft blobs of light resolve into denser symbols while the dark thins to sparse marks. The whole scene re-typed as text-mode art.
Tracking Bad VHS tracking — soft colour bands wobbling with tape jitter, chroma bleeding into red and blue ghosts, and a tracking-error band of snow rolling slowly up the picture while the bottom edge drops out. Warm analog decay.
Packet A live data bus — rows of byte cells streaming sideways at their own rates, values re-rolling as they pass, bright packet bursts travelling through the dim traffic while a read cursor sweeps the columns. Horizontal data flow, all signal.
Kaleido
Teleido The archetypal kaleidoscope: a single wedge of soft jewel-light blobs mirror-folded around the centre and slowly rotated, so the figure endlessly reshuffles as the unseen object cell drifts through the tube. Jewel hues bloom on near-black with a faint rim of light running the mirror seams, brightest at the luminous core and falling to a dark rim.
Vitrail A stained-glass rose window built from the mirror-fold: concentric rings of leaded panes wheel around a bright central boss, each ring glowing its own palette hue. A slow tide of light blooms outward through the glass ring by ring while the whole window turns almost imperceptibly; the dark lead cames stay black so the panes read as backlit glass.
Chamber The three-mirror tube seen as wallpaper: a real kaleidoscope's triangular mirror chamber tiles the whole plane with reflected copies of one triangle, so the frame fills edge-to-edge with a repeating jewelled honeycomb instead of a single radial star. Coloured glass motes drift through the fundamental triangle while the lattice slowly slides and turns; cut-glass glints run the mirror seams.
Dichroic Dichroic glass: the mirror-fold is sampled at a slightly different angle per colour channel, so every reflected edge splits into an oil-slick iridescence — cyan on one flank, magenta on the other. Concentric shard bands swirl through the wedge and the seams flare with colour fringes where they cross, jewel-bright and restless on near-black.
Harlequin A cut-crystal mandala of hard, flat facets. Where the rest of the family blurs, this keeps knife-sharp mirror seams: the folded field is quantised into diamond facets, each flat-shaded a single jewel hue with a bright bevel glinting at its edges. Inner and outer rings counter-rotate, so the diamond pattern shears and reshuffles as the stone slowly turns.
Mandorla An ornate guilloche rosette — the lacework end of the family, drawn in light rather than filled cells. Dozens of fine wavy rose-curves of different petal counts interweave into engraved lace, jewel nodes flaring where the threads cross. The whole rosette breathes as the curve amplitudes swell and ease, and turns slowly so the moire of crossing threads shimmers like a spun mandala.
Tumbler The feel of turning the tube: angular glass shards in the object cell that each tumble on their own axis while the mirror-fold reflects them. As the chips rotate and slide, the reflected figure keeps re-locking into fresh symmetric arrangements — the characteristic click-and-reshuffle of a kaleidoscope being turned, hard-edged chips of colour on near-black.
Anthelion Named for the mirrored counter-sun halo — the luminous, higher-key end of the family. A blazing multi-hue core throws a corona of mirror-folded rays of uneven length, long spikes between short ones like a real sun corona, crossed by a finer counter-rotating spark fan and ringed by concentric arcs broken into glowing beads. Pure bent light rather than cut glass, radiant on a deep dusk-blue sky.
Polytope
Hedron The five Platonic solids cross-fade one into the next — tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron — a single satin-shaded form forever rebuilding itself under a soft studio key and rim light. The keystone of the Polytope set: an exact SDF for each regular solid, beveled and slowly turning.
Strut A single icosahedron drawn as a cage of glowing edge-tubes — see-through, so the far edges shine faintly through the near ones as it tumbles. All thirty edges accumulated volumetrically from the solid's face planes, neon on deep dark.
Cast One glossy solid caught forever mid-transformation — a sphere swelling into a rounded cube, collapsing to an octahedron, opening into a torus and back. Smooth SDF blends keep it liquid yet geometric, lit like a polished resin maquette.
Lapidary A cut gemstone — an icosahedron shaded flat per facet so each face catches the light as a hard plane, edges sparking white where two facets meet, with a slow iridescent fire that drifts across the stone as it turns.
Phalanx A regiment of small octahedra marching out of the fog toward you — an endless lattice of solids, each cell tumbling on its own, dimming into depth so the field reads as deep parallax rather than a flat grid.
Armature A solid dodecahedron sealed inside a glowing icosahedral wire cage that turns the opposite way — shaded surface and see-through edge-tubes in one frame, the two solids sliding against each other as they counter-rotate.
Stellate A stella octangula — two tetrahedra driven through each other into an eight-pointed star — turning slowly with its spike tips glowing hot, the whole compound breathing its points in and out.
Prism A solid of clear glass — an octahedron you see straight through, the palette environment bending and splitting into spectral colour as it refracts twice through the stone, with a bright fresnel rim where the surface turns away.
Manifold
Gyroid A raymarched flight through a gyroid, a triply-periodic minimal surface that tiles all of space into one smooth interwoven labyrinth. The camera drifts forward through the lattice while the thickened surface glows volumetrically, shaded by its own normals, hue turning with depth and fading into fog. A true 3D engine rather than strokes on black, it fills the frame because it is a solid the eye flies through.
Diamond A raymarched flight through a Schwarz Diamond, a triply-periodic minimal surface with sharper, more crystalline chambers than the gyroid. The camera drifts through the lattice while thin walls catch a raking light with crisp silhouette edges, hue turning with depth and fading into fog. A sibling of the gyroid on the same 3D engine, with a colder, more faceted character.
Neovius A raymarched flight through a Neovius surface, a triply-periodic minimal surface of fat rounded pockets joined by narrow necks, softer and more bulbous than the gyroid or diamond. The camera drifts through while walls catch a soft light with topographic contour ribbing wrapping each pocket, hue turning with depth into fog. A sibling on the same 3D engine, with a warm organic character.