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No.95 · Backgrounds

Silk Field

Domain-warped light that pours like liquid silk, with an optional glass lens that refracts the flow under your cursor.

The prompt

Written for the variant you picked above: Tide

Write a full-bleed animated background in raw WebGL1 — one full-screen triangle and one fragment shader, no libraries. The image is domain-warped fractal noise (three-octave fBm, warped twice: q from p, r from p + 1.8q, final f from p + 2r), all drifting very slowly with time (0.025–0.035 per axis). Map f through a four-stop palette ramp (base → deep → accent → highlight, with smoothstep bands at 0–0.42, 0.42–0.74 and 0.8–1.0), then add a silky sheen: a sharpened sine of f and r (pow 5) that adds a little accent and a touch of highlight, so the flow reads like light moving across folds of satin. Finish with a faint dithered grain to kill banding. Optionally render a glass lens: inside a circle of radius ~0.3 of the height, magnify the flow (×0.7 toward the centre), bend it by a hemisphere normal, and split the green and blue channels slightly for chromatic aberration; add a rim light that is brighter on the upper-left and a soft shadow on the opposite side, and gently darken a thin band just outside the lens. The lens can follow the cursor (lerp 0.18), or drift on a slow Lissajous path around (0.62, 0.52) when there's no pointer. Performance: render at 0.6× resolution (0.4× on touch), cap to 30fps on coarse pointers, pause when offscreen or the tab is hidden, and render a single still frame under reduced motion or on weak devices. Pass the palette as four colours (base, deep, accent, highlight); if it changes, crossfade the uniforms over ~900ms with smoothstep instead of recreating the context. Ship a CSS radial-gradient fallback built from the same four colours for when WebGL is unavailable. Selected variant — Tide: Palette SILK_PALETTES.tide = [#060b14, #0b2a5c, #1b6fd4, #9cc8ff]: navy-black base, deep blue, bright azure accent, pale sky highlight. Glass lens follows the cursor (lens="cursor", lensRadius 0.28, intensity 0.75).

Notes

Interaction
With lens="cursor", a refracting glass lens follows the pointer across the whole page; otherwise it drifts slowly or is off.
Motion
Continuous shader time at `speed`; lens lerp 0.18 (cursor) / 0.04 (drift); palette crossfade 900ms smoothstep.
Accessibility
Canvas is aria-hidden and purely decorative. Reduced motion renders one still frame. Place text over it with a scrim if contrast drops below 4.5:1.
Responsive
Fills its container. Render scale 0.6 (0.4 on touch), DPR capped at 1, 60fps (30 on touch).
On touch
On touch devices a cursor lens becomes a slow drifting lens.

Featured

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301 components