Oleksandr Popov Live Wallpapers.

For Android live wallpapers it is very important to be lightweight. To get the best possible performance, smallest memory and power usage we constantly improve our live wallpapers by reducing the size of app resources and using various compressions supported by hardware. The latest update of 3D Buddha Live Wallpaper introduced a more compact storing 3D objects to save memory and improve performance. We’ve updated its WebGL demo counterpart in the same way, and in this article we will describe the process of this optimization.

Particles are one of the easiest ways of improving the visual appearance of any scene. When we decided to update visuals of our 3D Buddha Live Wallpaper the most obvious way of filling in the empty space around Buddha statue was to add some smoke/fog particles. And we have achieved quite good looking results by using soft particles. In this article we will describe the implementation of soft particles in pure WebGL / OpenGL ES without any 3rd party library or engine used.

Now WebGL works in almost any browser, including mobile ones so it was tempting to try it out. We have experience in creating Android apps using OpenGL ES 2.0. We have released quite a lot of 3D live wallpapers with rich 3D graphics. They are implemented in Java + OpenGL ES 2.0 without using third-party game engines (such as Unity) or high-level frameworks (such as libGDX). This makes our apps lightweight and well-optimized. And since WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.0 process of porting live wallpaper to run in browser is quite straightforward.

As soon as Google announced possibility to create custom watch faces with new Android 5.0 for Android Wear, we’ve ordered brand new ASUS ZenWatch to develop watch face (I be lieve nothing can beat qu ality of this device for its price ). We decided not to port any of existing live wallpapers to Android Wear but to create some completely new scene for it. This resulted in creating Axiom Watch Faces app which consists of 5 digital watch faces, implemented in 3D with OpenGL ES 2.0.

Idea came from some video which was inspired by design of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, namely design elements with broken glass shards. In a few days we've completed final vision of scene and implemented first version of live wallpaper in one weekend. As result of this work we proudly present Shattered Glass 3D Live Wallpaper . In this article we will explain rendering techniques used in creation of this live wallpaper.

  Introduction During development of our live wallpapers we have tried various scenarios of using OpenGL ES and have used many optimizations of both performance and visuals of our live wallpapers. In this article I will try to tell what problems can developer experience while developing for OpenGL ES on Android.