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.

Right after we've released our latest 3D Buddha Live Wallpaper an idea to make a landing page for this app emerged. Because what is the best way to show features of live wallpaper? To run it right in user's browser, of course. Thanks to WebGL users can preview exactly the same rich, fully 3D graphics and smooth performance as in full-featured Android app right in mobile browser. This experience is way beyond watching screenshots or video of an app on Google Play.

WebGL 2 recently became available in latest Firefox and Chrome so it was tempting to try out some of its new features. One of the most important WebGL 2 (and OpenGL ES 3.0, which it is based upon) features is instanced rendering . This feature reduces draw calls overhead by drawing the same geometry multiple times with altered transformations. It was supported in certain implementations of WebGL 1 too but required a certain extension. Most useful for foliage and particles, this technique is also quite often used to simulate fur.

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.