Generative animated wallpapers for Wayland/Hyprland.
No video downloads. duskpaper renders seamless loops on your machine, at your monitor's exact resolution, from procedural scene engines (numpy piped into ffmpeg). Change the seed and you get a wallpaper nobody else has.
Six scenes, all built for working on top of: dark, slow, and quiet.
| scene | what you get | preview |
|---|---|---|
aurora |
northern lights breathing over a dark ridge |  |
galaxy |
slow drift across a Milky Way band, twinkling starfield, the odd meteor |  |
silk |
deep-blue curl-noise ribbons folding through each other |  |
embers |
warm sparks rising on true black |  |
fireflies |
a firefly meadow under a night sky |  |
tide |
a low moon laying a glade of light on slow, dark swell |  |
Every loop is seamless by construction, not by luck. All motion in the engines is an integer-frequency function of the loop phase, so the last frame flows back into the first exactly. A 2-minute loop plays forever without a visible seam.
You need ffmpeg and mpvpaper
(AUR: mpvpaper).
uv tool install git+https://github.com/marko-builds/duskpaper
# or: pipx install git+https://github.com/marko-builds/duskpaperduskpaper list # scenes + palettes
duskpaper set aurora # render at your resolution (cached), go live
duskpaper set silk --seed 3 # your own variant of the scene
duskpaper off # back to your static wallpaperset detects your focused monitor via hyprctl (on other wlroots
compositors pass --res WxH explicitly), renders the loop once, caches it,
and runs it as your wallpaper via mpvpaper.
The one-time render is CPU-bound and depends on the scene, not your monitor: fireflies about a minute, galaxy a few, tide around eight, embers and aurora around ten, silk about twenty on a modern CPU. After that it's cached and instant.
render gives you the file without touching your desktop:
duskpaper render galaxy --res 3840x2160 --seconds 120 --out galaxy.mp4Useful knobs on both: --seed (a different instance of the scene),
--palette (aurora, ember, ice, gold, nord; duskpaper list shows what each
scene supports), --seconds, --fps, --native (internal render width;
higher = finer detail, slower render).
- Decode is
hwdec=auto. On an Intel iGPU a 1600p/30fps loop sits around 5% of one core. - mpvpaper runs with auto-pause: when a fullscreen window covers the wallpaper, playback pauses and the cost drops to about zero.
On Omarchy, theme switches relaunch swaybg, which covers the animated wallpaper. Two lines fix that.
Restore after theme changes, in ~/.config/omarchy/hooks/theme-set.d/50-duskpaper:
#!/bin/bash
duskpaper onStart on login, in ~/.config/hypr/autostart.conf:
exec-once = duskpaper on
duskpaper on is a no-op unless a wallpaper is enabled, so both lines are
safe to keep permanently. duskpaper off restores your static wallpaper
exactly as it ran before.
One gotcha: Omarchy's wallpaper-cycle keybind (omarchy theme bg next) has
no hook, so it replaces the animated wallpaper with the theme's static one.
duskpaper on brings it back.
MIT