Plasma

Full-color plasma background family with five hand-tuned styles (Solar / Prism / Spectrum / Ember / Lilac), each shipping its own 5-stop palette — switch style with a single enum

Free

Free with a ShipSwift account.

Copies a short instruction with your private download link. Paste it into your agent: it downloads the whole skill (the source code, the setup steps and the mistakes we already made for you) and builds the screen.

Works with

+70

What it does

Family of full-color plasma backgrounds rendered through SwiftUI's colorEffect Metal pipeline. Five hand-tuned styles share the same parameter surface (5-stop palette + scale / intensity / distortion); switching style swaps both the shader and the palette so the call site sees the intended look in one line.

Also usable as a button-border ring by clipping the renderer to a Circle() or Capsule() and inset-ing a darker pill on top.

All five entry points live in a single SWPlasma.metal because they share the same hash / value-noise / FBM / palette helpers and only differ in the final color-mixing step. Requires iOS 18+ / macOS 15+.

What you get

✓670 lines of source code, ready to paste
✓File Layout
✓Source Code
✓Usage
✓Parameters
✓Integration Checklist
✓Notes / Gotchas

animationmetalshaderplasmabackgroundpaletteSwiftUI

Usage

// Default — solar warm-orange plasma
ZStack {
    SWPlasma()
        .ignoresSafeArea()
}

// Pick a style — palette auto-defaults to the style's hand-tuned set
SWPlasma(style: .prism)
SWPlasma(style: .ember, intensity: 1.4)

// Override individual palette stops (others fall back to the style default)
SWPlasma(style: .lilac, c5: .white)

// As a section background
myContent
    .background { SWPlasma(style: .spectrum) }

// As a button border ring — clip the plasma to a Circle, then inset a dark fill
ZStack {
    SWPlasma(style: .prism)
        .clipShape(Circle())
    Circle()
        .fill(Color(red: 0.07, green: 0.07, blue: 0.08))
        .padding(2.5)
    Image(systemName: "arrow.up")
        .font(.system(size: 22, weight: .semibold))
        .foregroundStyle(.white)
}
.frame(width: 64, height: 64)

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Notes
`style`	`SWPlasmaStyle`	`.solar`	`solar` / `prism` / `spectrum` / `ember` / `lilac`
`c1` … `c5`	`Color?`	`nil` → `style.defaultPalette[i]`	Style-specific — 5-stop palette hand-tuned per style; pass `nil` to keep the default
`scale`	`Float`	`1.0`	Spatial scale multiplier (0.2…3 in sheet)
`intensity`	`Float`	`1.0`	Multiplier on the field value before palette mapping (0…2.5 in sheet)
`distortion`	`Float`	`1.0`	Strength of the noise distortion added to the sin field (0…3 in sheet)
`showsControls`	`Bool`	`false`	Demo-only gear ToolbarItem; requires `NavigationStack`

Style-by-style notes:

solar — warm orange / amber / red, 3-octave FBM, single field, pow(v, 4) highlight boost.
prism — rotating direction vector + RGB channel split on X (±0.025), 2-octave FBM, ultraviolet purple → pink → yellow → cyan.
spectrum — like Prism but biased vertical (time * 0.22 + 1.57), RGB split on Y, 3-octave FBM with time-shift.
ember — radial term + tighter pre-scale (scale * 1.3), pow(v, 1.6) gamma boost, pow(v, 6) * 0.55 high-power hotspots.
lilac — slow phase (time * 0.7) + global breath envelope 0.5 + 0.5 * sin(time * 0.5), soft purple-pink pastel palette.

Integration Checklist

Copy SWPlasma.swift and SWPlasma.metal into your Xcode target.
Confirm the deployment target is iOS 18+ / macOS 15+.
Pick a style and let the palette default (SWPlasma(style: .prism) is enough).
For button-ring usage, clip the renderer to a Circle() / Capsule() and inset a darker fill of the same shape on top.
Keep to one instance per visible screen — Spectrum is the heaviest variant.

Notes / Gotchas

Cost is per-pixel and varies by style — Solar / Ember / Lilac each run a single FBM3 (3 noise samples); Prism runs three FBM2s (6 noise samples); Spectrum runs three FBM3s (9 noise samples). Spectrum is the heaviest.
When showsControls is true, the sheet's Style picker resets the five palette stops to the new style's defaults — already-tuned colors will be lost on style change. This is intentional so the caller can shop styles by name and see the designer's intent.
The renderer's first-frame base color is c3 (palette mid-tone) to avoid a black flash before TimelineView ticks in.
The five styles intentionally live in a single SWPlasma.metal because they share the same hash / value-noise / FBM / 5-stop palette helpers and only differ in the final color mixing step. The 5-stop palette mixer swPlasmaPal5 is smoothstep-interpolated between each adjacent pair.
The gear button is a native ToolbarItem — the call site must be inside a NavigationStack.