Wallpaper Submission: Mount Caustics, Translucent Mirage, Trails

gixo · August 21, 2023, 5:51pm

Hello everyone!
These are my 3 submissions for the KDE Plasma 6 wallpaper competition.

I wanted to achieve a clean and modern look by having a uncluttered design with a clear foreground-background distinction. I also wanted the design to be more inclusive, so the “Trails” and “Translucent Mirage” wallpapers are available in 10 color variants based on KDE Plasma accent colors, as well as 5 color pallets from the popular Linux distributions, listed under KDE’s website.

All the wallpapers are available in dark/light and vertical/horizontal variants.

All the design were made using Blender and Krita(for making masks) and are released under CC BY-SA 4.0. The .blend files are available if needed.

Download:

Full size images can be downloaded from: GitHub - notgixo/Plasma6Wallpapers: My submissions for the KDE Plasma 6 wallpaper competition.

Available sizes:
Horizontal 5120x X 2880px
Vertical 2160px X 4560px

Previews:

Images below are just previews, please refer to the Github repo above to see non-compressed versions.

Mount Caustics

Translucent Mirage

Trails

mika · August 21, 2023, 6:04pm

All of these are beautiful.

pprmint · August 21, 2023, 9:14pm

These are delightful. I love the Trails ones in particular.

gixo · August 22, 2023, 4:55am

Thanks! I’m thrilled that you like them.

grouped_sesame · August 22, 2023, 5:54am

Yeah I’m loving the Trails one as well (also they are all very nice!). Good luck to you.

gixo · August 22, 2023, 6:08am

Thank you for your kind words.

julicenri · August 22, 2023, 9:53am

Trails backgrounds look great! As a suggestion, perhaps consider talking a look at the default accent colours in Plasma as references for variants. Although, it does already seem like the Trails variants do cover all of those at least.

gixo · August 22, 2023, 10:09am

Thanks! I am using those exact accent colors from Plasma, but as the wallpapers are 3d renders and I was trying to achieve my design using a glass material with translucency and light scattering, the colors won’t be rendered exactly as they are. I also tried to get closer results to those colors in renders, but made the “Trails” to look a bit dull.
I’m gonna do some color correcting to see if I get any good results.

julicenri · August 22, 2023, 10:14am

For brighter background colours, maybe try to use black as a base foreground colour instead of white/grey? Essentially, invert the base colour of the waves.

gixo · August 22, 2023, 10:18am

I did, but as the lines are using glass-like material, they didn’t look as good. But I’ll definitely give it some more tries to see if I can achieve better results.
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

julicenri · August 22, 2023, 10:21am

Hmm, could maybe try having a dark-tinted glass material?

gixo · August 22, 2023, 10:22am

I’ll give it a try.

kenning · August 22, 2023, 10:11pm

These are all AWESOME. Blurry, rounded edges, abstract, not too flashy.

DenysMb · August 23, 2023, 5:28pm

They are incredible! Really beautiful! I really liked the Suse Dark variant.

Do you imagine how good looking would be Plasma 6 if they ship with them by default, out of the box?

The only downsize is that it doesn’t looks good on ultra wide resolutions.

Good luck for you.

gixo · August 23, 2023, 7:32pm

Thanks for your kind words and your feedback, I really appreciate it.
I did notice the problem for the wide screens after I uploaded them. I want to try to fix them as well as try new colors for the Trails, but it might take some time as I’m a bit occupied with other stuff at the moment.

manueljlin · August 28, 2023, 7:16pm

Trails and Translucent Mirage are fantastic and (imo) would leave it as is
Mount Caustics also looks great, but the purple and blue gradient isn’t as soft as the other two wallpapers. Could you try to do another variant with a smoother transition? Thanks!