Effects Overview

List of Effects

The following effects are included with Wallpaper Engine by default. You can find more community-made effects by clicking on Workshop at the top of the editor and then Browse Assets on Workshop.

Click on an effect to learn more about it. We recommend experiment with different effects for different purposes. For example, the Shake effect can be utilized to simulate breathing and the different water effects can often be used to simulate wind, clouds and smoke, be creative!

Animation Effects

Foliage Sway

Animates the corners of the image and adds a wind motion. Useful to animate grass and bushes to sway in the wind.

Iris Movement

Adds motion to the eyes of a character and makes them look around realisitcally.

Pulse

Adds a color pulse to the image. Can be used to animate flickering or pulsating lights.

Scroll

Continuously scrolls the image in a direction.

Shake

Alternates part of the image back and forth. Can be used for objects but also useful for animating breathing characters.

Spin

Rotates part of the image continuously. Can be used for wheels, for example.

Swing

Swings part of the image back and forth. Can be used for signs, roof lights, flags or other swinging objects.

Twirl

Applies a spiral animation to the image. Can be useful for wheels, galaxies or any other spinning object.

Water Flow

Simulates a continuous flow on the image in-place. The section that this effect is applied to will be repeated on a small scale. Sometimes also useful for clouds and smoke.

Water Ripple

Distorts the image to add a ripple effect. The effect can optionally be scrolled along a specified direction.

Water Waves

Applies an abstract water wave to the image. Can be used for cloth or hair animations as well.

Blur Effects

Blur

Applies a coarse gaussian blur to the image. Significantly more performant than Blur Precise.

Blur Precise

Applies a precise gaussian blur to the image. Useful to achieve better results with outlines, god ray effects and similar.

Motion Blur

Blurs the animation on the image by accumulating the picture over time.

Radial Blur

Applies a circular blur on the image by accumulating the picture over time around a pre-defined point.

Interactive Effects

Cursor Ripple

Creates a ripple effect when the mouse cursor moves over it.

Advanced Fluid Simulation

Creates a realistic fluid / smoke / fire simulation that can react to mouse movement of the user.

Depth Parallax

Creates a depth effect that reacts to the mouse movement of the user.

X-Ray

Blends between two images based on the position of the mouse cursor.

Colorization Effects

Blend

Blends images and image layers together.

Blend Gradient

Blends two images or image layers together using a gradient mask.

Chromatic Aberration

Creates a colored distortion in a configured direction.

Clouds

Adds clouds on top of the current layer.

Color Key

Turns the image translucent where it has a specific color, this is essentially a green screen effect though any color can be used.

Film Grain

Adds a noisy film grain effect.

Fire

Adds a fire effect to specific areas of the image.

Light Shafts

Adds lights shafts in a custom shape and color to your image.

Nitro

Adds an electro static fizzle effect to the image.

Opacity

Can be used to make parts of the image translucent.

Reflection

Adds a dynamic reflection to parts of the image.

Tint

Changes the color of the layer.

VHS

Adds distortion and colorization of an old video tape.

Distortion Effects

Fisheye

Distorts the image with a fish eye effect.

Perspective

Adds a perspective warp to the image.

Refraction

Distorts the image based on a normal map, especially suitable for simulating ice.

Skew

Shifts the image on each border.

Transform

Allows you to rotate, scale or offset the image.

Enhancement Effects

Edge Detection

Applies sobel edge detection to the image.

God Rays

Adds radial or directional light beams to the image from bright areas.

Local Contrast

Enhances the contrast of the image.

Shine

Creates a shimmering shine effect on bright areas of the image.