Wave Background Generator
Make a wave background of layered, rolling waves in your colors, from calm swells to a choppy sea. It is seeded, so every export redraws exactly the same waves.
What is a layered wave background?
It's a stack of color bands with wavy top edges, each one a step further along a color ramp, so the picture reads as sea, dunes or hills fading off into the distance. You'll see this flat, paper-cut style a lot behind headings and on slides.
Every crest here is a sine wave (the smooth, repeating curve) with a second, shorter swell added on top for chop. Neighboring layers drift in opposite directions, and that alone gives the motion depth, no 3D needed.
How to make a wave background
Pick a preset (Ocean, Dunes, Hills, Peach, Paper cut, Neon night, Calm or Choppy) or set Colours yourself. The first color is the sky, and the rest are the waves, back to front. Layers stacks anywhere from one to eight waves, spread between 30 and 92 percent of the way down the frame.
Height is how tall the waves are and Length is the distance from one crest to the next, both in pixels of a 1080p frame. Chop adds the second swell. Speed sets how fast everything drifts, and Seed draws a fresh set of waves.
Settings for a section divider, a stepped sunset and a stormy sea
Section divider: the Calm preset (Height 20, Length 900, three layers, Speed 0.2) makes long, low swells. Save a still and trim it to the bottom strip to use as the edge between two parts of a page. There's a cropper on the Image Tools hub.
Stepped sunset: set Height to 0 so the waves flatten into level bands, then choose the Dusk ramp under Colours with Layers 6. That gives you a sunset in flat steps. At Height 8, each edge picks up a slight ripple.
Stormy sea: use the Choppy preset (Height 110, Length 140, Chop 1, seven layers), turn Speed up to 1.5 and run a ramp from a pale gray sky down to near-black water, say #d9d9d9, #8a8f96, #3c4148 and #111417. For a synthwave title, Neon night keeps the rolling shapes but in violet, pink and cyan.
Why is the top of the frame left empty?
The back wave sits 30 percent of the way down, so everything above it is sky in the first color of the ramp. The space is left there on purpose, for a heading or a logo.
To get more water in the frame, raise Height so the back crests climb higher. Adding Layers won't help, since it just packs the same span tighter. If you want waves from edge to edge, make the first color a water color as well.
Saving waves
A still of waves is a few flat bands with soft edges, and both PNG and GIF hold that in a small file. Each layer drifts at its own rate, though, so the clip never returns to its first frame. Set Seamless loop to 1 or 2 seconds before you record a GIF that has to repeat.
If you want the color without a horizon, Mesh Gradient Generator has the same named palettes as a soft blend.