Screen Saver
Marine Aquarium
A reef aquarium with photographic textures and three-dimensional fish. A pair of clownfish stays in the tank while visitors from a collection of 20 species gradually come and go. Garden eels withdraw into their burrows when fish approach. Crabs and shrimp move across the sand, with two seahorses near the coral and a glass ornament showing the local time. The artwork was generated for this scene, with a photograph used as a reference for the clownfish.
Made from clownfish reference photograph by CrisisRose ( CC BY-SA 3.0 ) underwater ambience by DCSFX ( CC0 ) tank pump and bubbles by 7778 ( CC0 ) single bubbles by BMacZero ( CC0 )
Swiss Alps
This is the quiet one. The backdrop is a photograph of an alpine valley that goes the whole way round, so it drifts sideways for as long as you leave it without ever reaching an edge or showing the join. Cattle graze across it in three bands of distance, and where each one stands is read out of the photograph rather than guessed, because guessing put cows in the trees. Every animal carries its own bell and rings it when it moves, out of time with the others, the way a herd actually sounds. Those are real bells, cut out of a recording made walking through a herd in the Austrian Alps. I started with a cowbell from a percussion library and it sounds nothing like the real thing.
Made from alpine valley photograph by Andreas Mischok ( CC0 ) cowbells in the distance by florianreichelt ( CC0 ) cowbell recordings the single rings are cut from by aUREa ( CC0 ) cow artwork by brooss ( CC BY 3.0 )
Aquarium (original)
The busier one, and the one I kept adding to. A tank seen side on, with every sprite squashed down to a small palette on purpose so it looks like something that shipped on a disc rather than something running in a browser. Fish swim in three layers and the ones at the back are smaller, dimmer and slower, which is the whole of the depth. Most of the interest is on the floor: crabs sidling about, shrimp darting between the weed, seahorses hanging near the glass, and a colony of garden eels that sway up out of the sand and drop straight back into it when a fish comes too close. The fish came from a sprite pack. The crab, the shrimp, the seahorse and the eels I drew, because nothing I could find fitted alongside them.
Made from fish, bubble, weed and rock artwork by Kenney ( CC0 ) underwater ambience by DCSFX ( CC0 ) tank pump and bubbles by 7778 ( CC0 ) single bubbles by BMacZero ( CC0 )
I wanted something on the site you could open and then stop looking at. Everywhere else here the icons are drawn by hand and the sounds are made in the browser, and these scenes are the one place that rule breaks. It felt like a fair trade. A cowbell is a lump of metal with a mess of a spectrum, and nothing built out of oscillators comes close. The source photographs, artwork and recordings are credited under each scene. The marine aquarium also uses artwork generated for this site.
Harry Chapman