Wallpaper Submission - Hills Of Saturated Excellence

[SomeOrdinaryDude]

My first iteration, open to critique and change. Hills Of Saturated Excellence is meant to show technological sophistication with its futuristic vibe, “fits like a glove” thanks to familiar operating system icons (specifically from KDE plasma) and the rocket on the left is meant to show some degree of progress and personal growth. Transparent logo icons may hint towards the idea of open source and trustworthiness.

Color usage and polygonal shapes are mostly inspired by previous plasma wallpapers. Additionally, I got jealous of the illustrated look previous wallpapers have achieved, so I added a painterly texture made in GIMP as a material to most of the image, and a “cubified” photograph I took of some skies outside the window as the sky. This is supposed to make it slightly illustrated, though I personally still think it looks too amateur 3D-ish.

The images are of 16 bit color and utilize a wide dynamic range, since I want it future proofed for when linux gets wide HDR support.

I will link a personal nextcloud folder which includes all design iterations, and the blender source file with all assets packed in. If there are any questions regarding how I made a certain asset or image, don’t be afraid to ask. All can be replicated using open source software. Note: I used a plugin for GIMP named Gmi’c to make the painterly texture and “cubified” sky texture.

Blender was used for the raw image. Darktable was used to fine tune the colors. GIMP was used to remove certain ugly artifacts. Instant Meshes was used to make the sculpted and generated terrains have good looking polygonal topology. Before and after edits are also in the nextcloud link.

I am also trying to make a portrait version, but only landscape is available for now.

Note: The blender file is a bit unfriendly to view perhaps, I should have organized and named things better. Essentially, the same file is used for night and day variations, but a few things are changed in world material and textures between each. For convenience, I have provided a separate blender file for each.

License is exactly as needed: CC-BY-SA

Personal nextcloud link

[Waterfall]

In my humble opinion:

This is a very nice wallpaper, capturing what KDE wallpaper typically is, rather well. I like how it separated in 3 parts with wavy edges: ocean, land, sky. I like how Plasma logo is integrated, kinda like The Sun. Noise-alike textures in triangles and feathered edges of clouds are nice to see. I like scattered objects with frosted colored glass looks of sorts. The LEDs inside said objects (as well as laser going through rocket) is a nice touch, and I especially like how these light up in the dark version of the wallpaper.

Colors of the sky in the dark version look a bit weird to me (kinda alike burn marks?), but this is not necessarily bad, just unusual (and it is, fittingly, darker than the light version). The “waves” getting close to the camera (at the bottom of the image) look a bit odd and distracting for me personally (especially in light version, likely due to very pronounced reflection in big tiles), but once again, it may be just “me” thing, ocean being close helps to show perspective and also adds a bit of variation to the picture.

[SomeOrdinaryDude]

Thanks for feedback!

Yeah, your points about the bottom of the image and the night skies are things I had in mind. I didn’t intend for the blue terrain to be seen as a ocean, but I guess that works too.

My intention with the 100% black areas in the night sky was to have some absolute dark spots which utilize the qualities of a OLED screen, AKA the pixels would just be off. But I can understand how it also looks like burn marks.

The bottom terrain was intended to as you said, cause perspective. I wanted the camera to visibly be on top of a hill, and then for the hill to slope downwards, leading your eyes. Interestingly that idea came straight from a famous Zeld Breath Of The Wild wallpaper

The scale was intended to be more on that level, and with similar cartoony grass (one of the test images has an demo example). That ended up being difficult, but I still have 2 more submissions left, so maybe I can try.