Impress Living Backgrounds

Description

Twenty designed patterns, each with its own art direction, and a visual editor where you build the look by eye and watch it move as you change it.

The flow field advects hundreds of streaklines through curl noise, so the particles move together as a substance rather than each on its own sine wave, and a stir of the cursor leaves a vortex that keeps swirling after you stop. The storm has depth-laned rain and lightning on an irregular schedule. Embers ignite white-hot and rise through haze. The plasma ball’s filaments snap to your cursor when it touches the glass. Fireworks climb, burst and fall under gravity.

You design a background once on the plugin’s own screen, then place it anywhere: the block, a shortcode, Elementor or WPBakery. All four go through one renderer, so a background looks the same wherever you put it, and moving between editors never costs you the design.

Everything here is free. All twenty patterns, all six palettes, your own brand colours, the 3D layer and every control.

The visual editor

The plugin adds its own screen, not a panel buried in one builder’s sidebar. Pick a pattern from grouped cards, set the palette or type your brand colours, and tune density, speed, mouse strength and scale against a live preview that is running the real engine. Save it, name it, reopen it later, or start a new one from it.

Because the design is saved on your site rather than in one page’s markup, the same background can sit on several pages, and changing it changes all of them.

Every design also has a share code: copy it out of the editor to move a background to another site, or paste one in to load it. The code is just the design itself, so nothing leaves your site when you copy one.

The twenty patterns

Flow field, wormhole and plasma ball. Storm, embers, energy arcs, lava and goo. Fireflies, snow, light rays, moonlight, night sky and underwater. Fireworks, drone show, disco lasers, waveform, TV static, and a live sky whose sun, cloud, rain, wind and time of day are dials you set.

The drone show is yours to direct: type a word and the swarm forms it, set how many drones fly, and pick from a library of two hundred shapes, symbols and emoji. Drag them into the order you want, play them in order or shuffled, or choose an SVG from your media library and the swarm flies your own logo. A shape that has its own colours is flown in them, the way a real drone show paints a picture: the smiley arrives yellow, the tree green.

A caption over the background

Put one line of text on the stage and choose where it sits. It scales with the section, so it reads on a short banner and on a full-screen takeover, and screen readers are given the caption rather than being told to ignore the background.

The optional 3D layer

Any pattern can carry a slowly turning wireframe solid above it: icosahedron, torus knot, octahedron, dodecahedron, cube, sphere or cone. It can morph, glow, pulse, defocus, or render as a point cloud. The three.js renderer is bundled with the plugin and is only requested when a background actually turns the layer on, so a plain pattern never pays for it.

Four ways to place it

• In container, sitting in the normal flow of the page.
• Full bleed, edge to edge.
• Scroll lock, which pins the section and advances the animation as the visitor scrolls.
• Full-screen lock, a full-height takeover, with an optional header retract while it holds.

Built to stay light

• Renders at a capped resolution and throttles to the browser paint cycle.
• Pauses the moment the section scrolls out of view, so a background below the fold costs nothing while somebody reads the top of your page.
• Nothing executable is fetched from a remote server on a page view. Everything ships with the plugin and runs from your own site.

Respects the visitor

When somebody has asked their browser to reduce motion, the background paints a single still frame of the real pattern and stops, rather than substituting a flat gradient. A background with nothing to say is decorative, so it is hidden from screen readers; give it a description, or a caption, and that is read out instead.