Arcadia wallpaper

"Awake" version

The "awake" version was created first, inspired by a college classmate using toon shading and freestyle outlines to create a diorama. Instead I opted to create an animated wallpaper for two vertically-stacked horizontal screens, making it 1080p with doubled height (1920x2160). It's loosely themed around Skies of Arcadia with its floating islands and Delphinus-esque airships over an empty void.

The material shading was done by simply connecting a diffuse BSDF into a constant colour ramp, with about three colours per material and dedicated lights for each element of the scene such as each cloud. This means many elements needed to be deceptively far apart to prevent light from bleeding over to other objects and ruining the shading. Noise displacement was added to the trees and the roof of the windmill, while the background is simply the same shaded setup with a b-spline colour ramp with many set colours for a sunset gradient, using an area lamp from below.

To complete the effect, freestyle outlines were added thinly, sketchily and with a noise modifier to make the image look like a handdrawn animation. For animation itself, the clouds bob up and down slightly, which gives enough movement to the scene to make the other elements appear to float as well relatively to them on the simple background, aided by the jittery outlines. The propellers on the airships and the windmill also spin, the former linearly and the latter more bouncily as if ticking along; on these, the relatively low framerate is visible, complementing the handdrawn art style.

"Asleep" version

The "asleep" version is simply the awake version, but with a number of the colours fully desaturated. Warmer colours like the sunset and the islands' dirt are now grey, leaving the cooler colours of grass, blue airships and the yellow windmill is also left untouched as a landmark. This is the version I used as my actual wallpaper while using Wallpaper Engine with the animated awake version, as a sort of loading screen before the engine loaded up.

I later made a cropped square version that has stripes of the awake and asleep versions, giving the sky and dirt a wavy effect while the parts that stayed coloured when asleep stay unaffected. This was done by adding a dents effect to an overlay of diagonal stripes, and making the colours monochromatic along these stripes. It was used for a shirt design but looks like it could've been an album cover too.