triangles

Triangles

Seeded, renderer-switchable Delaunay backgrounds for the web. The library mounts behind an element's existing content, uses no global state, and produces the same static pattern for the same seed, options, and dimensions.

The interactive playground is deployed from main through GitHub Pages.

What can you make?

Triangles creates high-quality images from Delaunay triangulation and a flat-surface shader. Its patterns have been used for:

• Wallpapers
• Blog post headers
• Magazines
• Posters
• Interfaces and web-page backgrounds

The library provides raster and SVG export primitives. SVG output can be rendered at virtually any size, including billboard-scale artwork.

Examples

Some of the original project uses:

The original tool in action, creating 11 wallpapers in under 7 minutes: watch the YouTube demo.

More patterns from the original gallery are kept in this repository. The first image includes a text overlay added in Photoshop.

Install

npm install triangles

import TrianglesBackground from 'triangles';

const background = new TrianglesBackground(document.querySelector('#hero')!, {
  seed: 'launch-2026',
  renderer: 'auto',
  density: 180,
  depth: 80,
  lights: [
    { ambient: '#8a1b61', diffuse: '#ff9f1c', x: -0.35, y: 0.4, z: 180 }
  ]
});

The host retains its content. Triangles makes a static-position host relative and uses an isolated stacking context so the rendered element sits behind its children.

Browser script

API

new TrianglesBackground(host, options) accepts these options:

• seed: string or number used by the local deterministic PRNG.
• renderer: 'auto', 'webgl', 'canvas', or 'svg'. Auto prefers WebGL and falls back to Canvas.
• density: triangle-point density calibrated to a 500 by 500 pixel surface.
• depth, meshAmbient, meshDiffuse, and lights: surface appearance controls. Light x and y use a -1 through 1 coordinate system; z is distance from the surface.
• pixelRatio and maxPixelRatio: output-quality controls. Device pixel ratio is capped at 2 by default.
• pointer and animate: opt-in interaction and animation. Animation respects reduced-motion preferences.

Instances expose setOptions, setRenderer, resize, render, getOptions, getSeed, getSnapshot, toBlob, toSVGString, and destroy.

background.setRenderer('svg');
const svg = background.toSVGString({ width: 2400, height: 1400 });
const png = await background.toBlob({ width: 2400, height: 1400 });
background.destroy();

toBlob does not download files. It returns a browser Blob so applications can choose their own download, upload, or persistence behavior.

Development

npm install
npm run dev
npm run check
npm run build

npm run build:library produces the NPM package in dist. npm run build:playground produces the GitHub Pages artifact in site-dist.

Migration from v1

Version 2 is intentionally breaking. The old global FSS API, dat.GUI control panel, jQuery dependency, keyboard bindings, and bundled export/download code are removed. Use TrianglesBackground as the supported public API.

Inspiration and credits

The iOS game Monument Valley by ustwo inspired the original project, specifically its ocean simulation.

The original shader work was adapted from Matthew Wagerfield's MIT-licensed Flat Surface Shader repository.

Author

Maksim Surguy @msurguy

Releases

Pushing main validates and deploys the playground with GitHub Pages Actions. Pushing a v* tag whose version matches package.json validates and publishes the library to NPM with provenance. Configure the repository's GitHub Pages source as GitHub Actions and grant its GitHub Actions identity trusted-publisher access on NPM before the first release.

See PUBLISHING.md for the full release process, verification steps, and troubleshooting.

Future work

• Add automated browser-integration coverage for WebGL fallback, ResizeObserver, pointer interaction, reduced-motion animation, and toBlob output.
• Add visual-regression coverage for the playground.

License

MIT. The triangulation approach is based on the original project by Maks Surguy and Flat Surface Shader work by Matthew Wagerfield.