Liquid metal wallpapers for Mac

A desktop of molten chrome that rolls slowly under a studio light, with hot highlights running along every fold. Not a video loop: Pixel Soup draws it live on your Mac's GPU, so it never repeats and never ends.

How it is made

The Metal shape is a small program that bends a surface with layers of noise, then lights it the way a studio photographer lights chrome: one broad key light, a tight hot highlight, and a ring of light at the grazing edges. Your Mac runs it about 30 times a second, so the folds keep flowing behind your icons.

Because nothing is pre-rendered there is nothing to download, and no two moments are the same. Change the seed and the folds rearrange; turn up Warp and they twist harder; turn down Speed for a slow, heavy pour.

Any colour of metal

Pixel Soup ships 11 metal palettes: Gold, Copper, Gunmetal, Rose Gold, Mercury, Cobalt Melt, Frost, Gilt, Orchid, Fuchsine and Verdigris. Every other palette works too, from aurora greens to sunset oranges, and you can mix your own from up to five colours.

Want it to look like pixel art instead of a photograph? Pick a dither such as Bayer or Halftone and the chrome turns into a dithered, retro version of itself.

Setting it as your wallpaper

1. Click the little handle on the edge of your screen and open the editor.
2. Under Shape, pick Metal. Under Color, pick a metal such as Gold or Mercury.
3. Under Dither, pick Smooth for liquid chrome, or any other style for a pixel look.
4. Press Apply. Leave it Animated to keep it flowing, or switch to Still to freeze one frame as an ordinary desktop picture.

Will it slow my Mac down?

A frame of liquid metal takes the GPU a couple of milliseconds on an Apple silicon Mac, and Pixel Soup stops drawing whenever windows cover the whole desktop. More on that in how live wallpapers work on a Mac.

More like this

If you like Metal, try Silk (satin folds), Fold (one soft ribbon of light) and Halo (an eclipse with a breathing corona). They are all in the gallery of all 35 shapes.

Get Pixel Soup, $4.99 Once, no subscription. Also on the Mac App Store.