Looks like the poll has closed and the winner (with 58% of the vote) is Ub Iwerks, inventor of multiplane camera for animation.

Here's the Disney patent for the multiplane camera: https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=02201689&homeurl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft1.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO1%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526d%3DPALL%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsrchnum.htm%2526r%3D1%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526s1%3D2201689.PN.%2526OS%3DPN%2F2201689%2526RS%3DPN%2F2201689&PageNum=&Rtype=&SectionNum=&idkey=NONE&Input=View+first+page

Google patent search is a little easier to navigate: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/27/49/b4/a782168ae1a6f2/US2201689.pdf

Video on what it is to get inspired: https://youtu.be/YdHTlUGN1zw

To get things started, here's some of the images from the 1940 patent overlayed in inkscape.

I'm testing out creating a multiplane camera in Blender. Here's a video (link: https://youtu.be/EpK9k8ycV4A ) I took that runs through the multiplane camera patent from 1940 in a pseudo multiplane style. It's possible we could grab a still from this, or (see my comment on issue #687 about the 4 wallpaper styles) perhaps actually cycle through some of them?

More to come. Still below.

Here's a version that is closer to the actual functionality of the multiplane camera: https://youtu.be/gMvu4PfuHHE

Our concept for F34 from the Nest hackfest is as follows:

We will feature beloved Fedora characters such as beefy miracle, panda, badger, if we need more the extended family from the coloring books (3 little pigs, container commandos, dog/cat, and snow white & kubernetes dwarves.)

These characters will be done in a style influenced by Miyazaki, the Gris video game illustrations, Mary & the witches flower, cartoon saloon, stephen universe.

The background will be multilayered as a connection to Ub's multiplane camera, a watercolor style, heavy on the nature, rocks with charcaters or symbols embedded in them, trees ,maybe with faces, plants etc.

The characters can be very obviously on top of the bcakgroud, or if we want them lower contrast we can embed them in the scene ala Highlights Hidden Pictures puzzles.

One idea for the backgroud is to split it into quarters (or some other fraction) and have each quarter influecned by a discipline or region of Fedora contributors (e.g. a developers quarter that is more geometrical, in contrast to say a designers quarter) - or could be influenced by the four F's.

We're heavy on the ideas for this one, so some of this will be shaken out as sketches / visuals are put together.

Marie said she's happy to take point on this one so I'll assign it to her. She can focus on the character design, and we'd like a variety of contributors to work on background concepts and submit them here.

Some of these might be useful as inspiration for the various layers: https://imgur.com/r/Miyazaki/QeYuc

Hey folks! Got a couple sketches done over the weekend.. Please feel free to remix these..

Hello, everyone,
I made some composition sketch on paper (it's not good, it's just for concept) and tried thinking about where characters might be (by sketching in GIMP).
So, it's basically a view from the forest, in the distance I imagine mountains and clouds in blue sky, in the foreground Badger and Panda (maybe they're discussing something). Panda sits on the rocks, which are covered with some symbols, maybe also with Fedora related symbols. I can add more Fedora characters around them, if needed.

For now, I'm not sure about the landscape. What do you think, maybe it's not the right direction?
(I also made some clouds)

time to give some pattern hints:

https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp3160267.jpg
https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp3160274.jpg
https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp3160280.jpg
https://cdn.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/videos/7322113/thumb/1.jpg
https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp3160280.jpg

time to give some pattern hints:

https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp3160267.jpg
https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp3160274.jpg
https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp3160280.jpg
https://cdn.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/videos/7322113/thumb/1.jpg
https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp3160280.jpg
What do you mean with these hints, could you explain, please?

@kate I am loving your sketches, they really bring to life the very same concept we talked about initially with this project so good on you! I would keep going! Do you have an idea of next steps to keep iterating?

Also I think @gnokii is just posting some inspiration for the general theme is all! (Right @gnokii?) Usually each wallpaper we come up with a moodboard / inspiration board

@kate these are great! I love the soft watercolor with the hard sketch lines on top.

The clouds immediately had me imagining the beefy miracle in a red cape flying triumphantly through the clouds.

Excited to see what comes next!

@duffy @kylerconway thank you :)
For the next step, I'll try making 2-3 layers of trees (like with multiplane camera) in GIMP and mix them together, also adding watercolor texture filling. I figured, it would look more neatly as oppose to paint it all with watercolor, and also it'll give more control for future iterations.

Sorry for the late answer, situation here is a bit chaotic right now.

@kate its like Mo says

@duffy yes, what else :D

I tried watercolor textures with drawing in GIMP, they seem worse than I expected (I can't take a better picture of watercolor for textures and it looks too artificial, I think). So, I guess, it's better to paint in hand, but we can decide on composition here. Also, after @kylerconway commentary I've come up with a new idea :)
@duffy @kylerconway @gnokii What are your thoughts? Which idea is better or maybe something else? I will paint some more watercolor on paper now, I'll try to share it with you tomorrow.

@kate

about water color? or the design. First one, look out for Irzun, I think he had a very good water color filter for Inkscape. If not maybe I can sit down next week make one, but I think the default one should be good enough at all.
About the design, you not really wanna hear! We not DouDou Linux, we are Fedora. The technical drawings Kyler posted are more to the liking of our clientel. But I dont stop you, just go ahead who knows where it ends.

@kate

about water color? or the design. First one, look out for Irzun, I think he had a very good water color filter for Inkscape. If not maybe I can sit down next week make one, but I think the default one should be good enough at all.
About the design, you not really wanna hear! We not DouDou Linux, we are Fedora. The technical drawings Kyler posted are more to the liking of our clientel. But I dont stop you, just go ahead who knows where it ends.

Could you clarify what the wallpaper supposed to be - some abstract elements with a hint of watercolor effects or a watercolor landscape, should there be any Fedora characters at all? I'm confused.

Hi @kate apologies for the confusion. We had a session at Nest with Fedora where we discussed a bunch of ideas, I think it would be helpful. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC8BHb2ENoY&list=PL0x39xti0_66-VnwFuVEpS21cdJ1ihYbf&index=33

We talked about doing the movie film idea, and it is a pretty good idea, but we ended up moving towards a more illustrative concept. It should definitely fall in with the Fedora aesthetic to some extent, though I think we have a great deal of creative freedom when it comes to the wallpaper.

The work you have created so far is definitely going in the right direction, I think it will just take some more attempts and pushing what you have closer to the Fedora aesthetic. I made some quick attempt at trying to make it more "Fedora-y" not sure if it is successful, fwiw.

Some of my thoughts while I edited:

1. Blue
   Most of our wallpapers are really blue.. Check them out here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wallpapers - you will see they are not all blue, but with plenty of blue tones still involved

2. Darker/more contrast
   My example really didn't achieve this well. Though I think having a broad range of tones will be important to making it an interesting design.

3. Experimental
   I played with random filters in GIMP to create this effect. Try things, experiment, make sure to save copies so you can go back to them.

Hope all this helps! Let me know if you have more questions.

Best

@riecatnor I checked the video, I'm starting to understand a bit more, I hope :)
I'm open to any critique and suggestions.

I tried to make my watercolor more blue in GIMP, it turned out too light, I think.
And there's another art, this time all painted in GIMP, all blue, I looked at Steven Universe backgrounds and tried to make something similar. It's not finished yet. I think it can have moon and its light ripples on water. But I'm concerned that it still can be too contrast for a wallpaper, should it be less bright?
(I reduced the size of all these pictures, but I have them in a bigger format if needed)

@kate beautiful work so far! i just want to note that you'll probably have a better time with digital painting in Krita instead of GIMP - GIMP is more for photo manipulation while Krita is really aimed at digital painting, it has a lot of really nice painterly brushes including watercolor brushes and is just overall better set up for that mode of illustration.

In G'MIC there's a testing filter called "dreamy watercolor" that does some interesting things.

I ran one of the backgrounds @kate made through it and it's interesting for the watercolor effect (though I agree with @duffy that Krita is wonderful here).

I also quickly colored the beefy miracle that @riecatnor created and ran it through the same filter a couple of times. Also interesting.

Just food for thought.

@kylerconway I like those effects!
I also tried some watercolor effect (the first picture is as it was, the second with effects. I have both work files separately).
@riecatnor @duffy I'd like some feedback. Do I make it less bright, maybe add or get rid off something (I don't know if the moonlight makes it better or worse for the wallpaper)? Should I place characters there?
When the composition is settled, I will work on small details, which aren't neat enough yet.
(as always I have bigger images and GIMP files, if needed)

@kate i think this is really nice, I am wondering more at the conceptual level how you were thinking the characters would layer in on top. IT seems like a calm maybe even romantic background and a cartoon hotdog on top might be weird? But I'm not sure of the context you're thinking of? Are you thinking ditch the characters? I also think because of the theme, we'd want the layers to be maybe even a little exaggerated. Think of Little Big Planet - eg https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FRVstsowWFJ0%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

HI @kate @kylerconway loving these!!

@kylerconway I think we might need to publish this somewhere no matter what!! XD https://pagure.io/design/issue/raw/files/850a7bae32e177b723457d44951ec94a2806f34d99e34bae6718d6bde11f9d47-marie-dog-2.resized.png

@kate I think the moon and the moonlight is nice, but it standing out a lot from the rest of the art. I think it could be made slightly more subtle, or you could give it some more attention and make it more of a focal point. I like the option with the filter, though I agree with @duffy, the layers are blending, and could use some more definition.

@riecatnor @duffy Thanks for the feedback. I tried to make moon less bright, and layers more defined. Also I agree with @duffy that this kind of landscape would be weird with a cartoon character, so here I don't feel the need to add them.

But if characters are important I can develop further that idea with a balloon, I just thought it looks too childish (maybe making the characters smaller would help, and also changing the color palette to more "blue Fedora-y style").

I also made a rough abstract concept, maybe this would be more appropriate for the wallpaper (less distracting).

Would like to hear your thoughts.

I tried Krita for the first time, and I agree - the brushes are really interesting there :)
Here's a slightly new form of the same landscape (I tried making it less "cloudy"):
@duffy @riecatnor , waiting for your feedback.

Also, with more texture:

@kate these look great! I like the newest version made in Krita best, but there is something nice about this one too: https://pagure.io/design/issue/raw/files/41a387de665dc4dc54feac6ac69d7db546f9a277fae11b1db9c065ba1e876a7e-softer_moon_lake_small.png
I think it is because you have some of the foreground items very crisp, and background items blurred, which is a nice effect to show off the concept of this background. Perhaps try doing something like that with your most recent designs :)

Thanks for the great work!

@riecatnor thanks :)
I made some color polishing, blurred the background a little and added 34 fireflies, as we discussed earlier today. One picture is with more green, the other one with more blue fireflies (they are less prominent). How is it now?

Hi @Kate! We came up with some feedback on the latest version (https://pagure.io/design/issue/688#comment-699114) at an impromptu chat session last night between myself and @ramyaparimi, @ngompa, and @x3mboy:

Composition

We think the composition is really, really nice. It's harmonious, your attention doesn't get drawn any which way - it's very balanced. The only issue was the fireflies might need a little more work to be less distracting / cluttered.

Color palette

This is a perfect Fedora color palette. :) It is a bit dark though. We wondered if we could use this for the "night" time-of-day wallpaper and have an alternate color palette version for daytime?

Subject / Meaning

This is extremely serene and peaceful. Very appropriate given the times we live in right now in the midst of a global pandemic, etc. It's a departure from past Fedora wallpaper subjects but we think in a very good way. Generally our subjects are technical / scifi / impersonal, and this kind of brings in the "friends" value of Fedora being a very calming sort of scene and we think it's amazing.

It also, of course, with the very obvious multiple planes giving a nice depth to the image, relates strongly with our theme for F34 which is Ub Iwerks' multiplane camera invention.

Render quality

We felt this had a thumbnail sketch / storyboard quality, lacking some fine detail. We were wondering if that was intentional?

That was essentially it! In short: composition is dead on, we loved the subject matter, looking forward to a more detailed / higher res final work! Does this make sense?

@kate I just wanted to follow up with you to see if you still had time / interest to work on this?

Hi @kate just one more follow up, to see if you are still interested in working on the F34 wallpaper?

I poked around with the latest mockup in Gimp to try to tease out some daytime coloring. This is just meant to be a reference / sketchy type of thing. I also think in the foreground it might be nice to add some more color (maybe purple? like grape hyacinths?) via some flowers and other foliage. Coloration is meant to be springish

some work on the daylight version

... the blue forest print is great.
another idea is to combine a forest with a matrix effect?
You can create many beautiful effects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD9MQZZNI5I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcqaCQODOYo
I think you need to stimulate various emotions for Fedora users, see: http://renketkisi.com/en/psychology-and-color.html.

@duffy Were we still thinking of adding in some of the cartoon characters or some multi-plane type movement between the day/night layers?

@duffy Right now I don't have time, but maybe I'll keep working on it. You may assign anybody though :)
Here's krita file, so anyone can work with layers (there's a blurred layer at the top, without it the picture is more detailed. And there's the previous "roundy" shaped picture on the bottom layer just in case). Most of the layers I painted in Krita with c) Pencil-6_Quick_shade (its icon looks like 3 green pencils)

@kate -- I think they look great!

I quickly (read: badly) added the beefy miracle (one colorized and the other sketched in). This obviously makes the scene far less beautiful than before, but I'm more wondering if we're still thinking of adding characters in general so these are food for thought.

Lastly, I may play around with the idea of the versions being the movement of the multiplane camera (rather than the time of day). I don't know if this is better or worse given the slow framerate (i.e. 4 frames per day !) but the krita file kate provided should allow some experimentation.

Daylight looks great too, @duffy ! I love the sunlight framed tree outlines on the 1st version a lot!

Maybe there's room for movement of space and time?

Exciting work everyone!

I'd like to bring up that it'd be great if we can also think about a login splash screen for Plasma as this design is fleshed out? @duffy, @appadeia, and I had been talking about it in fedora-kde/SIG#31, but it probably makes sense to bring it to the wider team's attention to put it into the "story" being told with this artwork.

I vectorized this today, with the daylight palette. Next step is to texturize it and add gradients.

Texturized

just a quick preview of progress

just a quick preview of progress

Woahh this looks so cool with the texture! Vector magic

If anybody wants to test WIP, attaching here. appreciate any feedback!

Another WIP to test out:
- color shift towards blue
- sun beams added
- shading along shoreline added

Here's a blue-er version

Probably it's just me, but the green ones give me a openSUSE vibe, The blue ones are beautiful

Here's the latest WIP snapshot. Working my way up with detail from the bottom up.

Note from @riecatnor that there's a halo behind the left tree which needs to be ironed out!

Another note that we need at least a stand-in night version for beta for packaging.

@duffy Have you had a chance to look at the Plasma desktop splash+throbber for the artwork yet?

@ngompa starting on that today and into tomorrow!

Here's my beta proposal now.

These are full 4K resolution. If you wanna test 'em and let me know how it goes I'd love to hear your feedback. If I can't revise based on your feedback for beta, certainly can do for final. TIA <3

+1 for the second, the blue one, the first is brighter and brings the eyes to the point of light and that offers distraction...

Regards.,

@luya I put a PR together, let me know what you think! https://github.com/fedoradesign/backgrounds/pull/30

@duffy
As answered on Github, manually cropping into various size is no longer needed since Fedora 33. Simply use the highest resolution images (4k) as found on Standard folder. Bonus point for setting 5K version. Once you fixed these commits, I will merge them.

Hi folks, it looks like the color of the wallpaper is too close to the color of the Fedora overlay logo, such that the logo blends subtly into the wallpaper. We could pretend that it's an easter egg, but once you notice it doesn't look good. Only the bottom-right corner of the wallpaper is affected and it could probably be fixed by using darker colors there. See attached screenshot, look for the inadvertently-camouflaged Fedora logo in the bottom right, and squint if need be:

@catanzaro that logo in fedora-logos is going to be updated shortly - I can use white instead of blue and hopefully that will help!

@catanzaro hey I just looked into this, there are two svgs:

fedora_logo_darkbackground.svg
fedora_lightbackground.svg

It looks like F34 is using fedora_lightbackground.svg. It should be using fedora_logo_darkbackground.svg. So I can't fix it on my end. Do you know how the default image is getting set in GNOME?

looks like its /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.fedorahosted.background-logo-extension.gschema.xml is wrong, attaching fixed version. looks like it comes from gnome-shell-extension-background-logo-3.37.3-2.fc33.noarch

@catanzaro can you verify the attached fixes the issue for you

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1938009

It uses https://pagure.io/background-logo-extension which has settings we can edit to change the logo used. With fedora_logo_darkbackground.svg it looks like this:

That's significantly more prominent than we've used in the past. You can control the settings by navigating to /org/fedorahosted/background-logo-extension/ in dconf-editor. E.g. here I set the opacity to 127 to tone it down a bit, which probably violates branding rules, but looks closer to what we've shipped in previously releases. The overlay logo is a slightly controversial compromise and previously we've aimed for it to be subtle rather than striking:

I can change the default settings however you want, but we will not remember to review the settings again next release cycle, so once we change it that's what we'll have until somebody asks for them to be changed again.

CC @mattdm.

P.S. This wallpaper is amazing, good job. ;)

Well I see you were faster than me. Maybe Pagure doesn't notify of new comments, or maybe I just didn't notice....

@catanzaro it doesnt look like the correct logo in your screenshots, it shouldnt have the fedora bubble only the font and there is opacity built into the svg. sigh. maybe this is more complicated. i agree 100% that first example is too much, it should be more like the second. ill play with the new logo and the transparency settings... if we can set the default transparency thru that config file i think thats better.

@duffy there is just no dark background version of the logo we were using before, unfortunately. I ran into similar problems in fedora-logos#12 where I eventually wound up selecting mismatched logos for light vs. dark backgrounds.

@catanzaro it doesnt look like the correct logo in your screenshots, it shouldnt have the fedora bubble only the font and there is opacity built into the svg. sigh. maybe this is more complicated. i agree 100% that first example is too much, it should be more like the second. ill play with the new logo and the transparency settings... if we can set the default transparency thru that config file i think thats better.

The overlay logo extension has an opacity gsetting, so we can indeed set it to whatever we want without changing the logo itself.

Set it to half transparent:

$ gsettings set org.fedorahosted.background-logo-extension logo-opacity 127

Fully transparent is 0, fully opaque is 255. gsettings set org.fedorahosted.background-logo-extension logo-opacity when you're done playing around to get back to default (currently 255).

Oh I misunderstood your post, I see you're saying that the SVG itself already has opacity on top of that provided by the gsetting. You're a couple steps ahead of me I see....

@catanzaro How does this look? This is using the new logo that will be released in fedora-logos for F34 -

Here's the settings for this:

org.fedorahosted.background-logo-extension logo-opacity 255
org.fedorahosted.background-logo-extension logo-border 50
org.fedorahosted.background-logo-extension logo-size 9

I believe the border setting only is changed here. So I can mark that on the BZ, just wanted to make sure you were ok with the appearance before doing so.

LGTM. So that is the modified version of fedora_lightbackground.svg, and the only setting that needs to change is the logo-border setting? That should be very easy then.

@catanzaro yep that's correct! fedora-logos will take care of the svg so it's just the border that needs changing.

@catanzaro did i file this correctly or do i have to do anything else so it gets considered?

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1938009

That should be enough! I'll prepare MRs and ping Florian.

@catanzaro awesome thanks! And just to be clear - I was assuming fedora_lightbackground.svg which I believe is what is already set in F34, but you might want to double-check.

BTW I notice there's no new build of fedora-logos yet, so we released beta with the hidden logo unfortunately.

@catanzaro it's not too late for final though is it? I'll ask Tom to make a new build today, I had asked last week but it may have gotten lost in a pull request

Not too late indeed, that's why I'm commenting. :)