Scene Wallpapers

Scene wallpapers

Scene wallpapers are Wallpaper Engine's native format and the most common type on the Workshop: layered artwork with effects, particles, text, timelines, scripts, 3D models, lights and sound. Open Wallpaper Engine renders them natively with Metal, through each wallpaper's own shaders translated to Metal.

Important

Scenes need the Wallpaper Engine assets from your Steam copy. Without them, a scene says it needs them.

What works

Layers and effects

• Image, composition, fullscreen and solid layers, layers that sample other layers, and all 33 blend modes.
• Wallpaper Engine's own effects and materials, including effects Workshop authors made themselves, with effect masks.
• Colour lookup tables, Wallpaper Engine's colour correction, and the image filter and colour options in a wallpaper's properties.
• Bloom, and HDR bloom with "Ultra" post-processing; "Ultra (Display HDR)" outputs EDR on displays that can show it.

Text

• Text and clock layers sized, aligned and positioned as in Wallpaper Engine, with outline, blur and drop-shadow font effects, and effects on text layers.
• Text is rasterised at the display's pixel density, so it stays sharp on Retina displays.

Particles

• Every particle system is simulated on the GPU, in 3D, with 3D control points.
• Child systems (including ones triggered by their parent's particles), emitter bursts, delays, periodic emission, emitting from a layer's image.
• Turbulence, attractors, vortex and boid motion, ropes and trails, collision (including with a model's bones), audio response, rotation about every axis.
• Particle settings bound to user properties.
• The Particle Budget can thin very heavy systems.

Animation

• Timelines: keyframe and texture (sprite sheet) animations follow Wallpaper Engine's single, loop and mirror rules.
• Puppet Warp images posed by their animations, with bone physics (springs, gravity, limits) and objects attached to bones.
• Camera shake and cursor parallax, from Wallpaper Engine's own formulas.

3D and lighting

• 3D models with skinning, animation layers, morph targets and root motion.
• Perspective scene cameras with camera paths, fades and shake; 2D layers sit in depth.
• Scene lights with light cookies, shadows, planar reflections, distance and height fog, and volumetric lights.

SceneScript

• A complete SceneScript runtime: modules, the scene/layer/effect/material object model, animation events, localStorage, and cursor hit testing. Each wallpaper's scripts run on their own thread.
• Scripts can create layers, particle systems and sounds, move the fog, drive bloom, and pose puppets and models.

Audio and media

• Audio-reactive layers, effects, particles and scripts, from a spectrum computed the way Wallpaper Engine computes it, in stereo. Needs the System Audio Recording permission (Screen & System Audio Recording before macOS 14.2).
• Sound layers play on the scene's clock, with spatial sound placed as in Wallpaper Engine. Scene Music in Details turns a scene's own music on or off and sets its volume.
• Now Playing: scenes receive the current track (title, artist, album art) and playback state on macOS 15.4 or later, when Media integration support is on in Settings › Optimizations.

Properties

• The author's properties show in Details: sliders, checkboxes, lists, text, colours, and file/folder pickers, honouring their conditions, text rows and slider formats.
• Any property can Sync to Music, pulsing with the audio by an amount you choose.
• Properties are kept per display unless you sync them. Reset returns them to the author's defaults.

Tuning a scene

• Placement in Details: Fill, Fit, Center, Stretch or Zoom.
• User Scene Settings in Details: Animation Speed, adjustments, parallax and user text.
• The Scene Editor (Live) shows every object and lets you edit it live.
• Performance settings trade quality for speed.

Limits

• application wallpapers are not supported.
• Scene support is broad but still growing. A wallpaper that stalls or crashes the app is skipped on the next launch and marked in the library (see Troubleshooting).
• Performance, quality and anti-aliasing settings are designed for scenes and have limited effect on video and web wallpapers.
• Known gaps are tracked in Roadmap and known issues.

Read more (for developers): Scene pipeline, Shader translator, Particles, Models, puppets and lighting, SceneScript runtime