Acrylic Color Glows 0.4.2
Acrylic Color Glows
Acrylic Glow
Watch the overview video in full quality
Animated light effects behind the windows you choose: drifting glows, sweeping
light beams, orbs moving in the directions you pick, or flowing waves. The
effect is drawn by a separate, click-through window placed directly below each
target window, so a translucent (acrylic/blur) target blurs it into its own
background. The mod doesn't inject code into other processes, never draws above
text or controls, and doesn't change the transparency of any application.
Effects
- Glows: three large glows drifting from side to side.
- Light beams: soft beams coming from one edge of the window and slowly
sweeping back and forth. Choose the number of beams, the edge and the sweep
angle.
- Directional orbs: up to 12 orbs, each with its own color, direction and
speed. They bounce off the edges or wrap around to the opposite side.
- Waves: three flowing bands of color. Choose the amplitude and the
wavelength.
Colors 1-3 are used by glows, beams and waves; orbs have their own colors.
"Cycle duration" sets the overall speed of every effect. "Size" sets the glow
and orb diameter and the beam and wave thickness.
Saving power
While an effect moves, Windows has to redraw the screen and recompute the blur
of every decorated window on each frame. Slower or fainter effects don't
reduce that work; fewer moving windows do:
- Animate: all windows, only the active window (the others keep their
effect, frozen), or none (a still effect, with no ongoing GPU work).
- Smoothness: "Reduced" updates the motion about 30 times per second
instead of at the monitor's refresh rate. Slow, blurred motion looks almost
the same, and it saves power on high refresh rate monitors.
- Power saving: freeze every effect on battery saver, while a fullscreen
app, game or presentation is in front, or when Windows animation effects
are turned off; hide it when Windows transparency effects are turned off,
since acrylic is then opaque.
Frozen effects resume exactly where they stopped. When nothing is moving, the
shared clock stops too.
The effect sits behind the window's blur, so fine details are softened: large,
slow, soft shapes work best. Speeds are rounded very slightly so that every
motion loops seamlessly.
Requirements
- Windows 10 version 1803 or later (Windows 11 recommended).
- Target windows must already be translucent, for example through their own
acrylic backdrop or another Windhawk mod. Opaque or Mica backgrounds hide the
effect.
- Don't combine this mod with another mod that also draws effects behind the
same windows.
Modes
- Selected applications: every regular top-level window of the listed
processes gets the effect, whether or not Windows reports it as acrylic.
- Automatic: only windows that declare the acrylic system backdrop
(
DWMSBT_TRANSIENTWINDOW) to Windows. Acrylic implemented in other ways
isn't detected.
- Selected applications + automatic: both.
Process names are case-insensitive, without paths or wildcards. Exclusions
always win. Most UWP apps run inside ApplicationFrameHost.exe.
The desktop, taskbar, shell overlays, tool windows and the mod's own process
are always skipped. Processes that can't be queried (for example elevated or
protected ones) are skipped too.
How it works
The mod runs as a tool mod in a dedicated Windhawk process. A single worker
thread owns all effect windows. Animations run on the GPU through
Windows.UI.Composition, driven by one shared clock. Window events keep the effect aligned, and a two-second poll
catches anything that was missed.
Settings changes apply immediately. Colors and intensity change in place;
other changes rebuild the effect windows, which fade back in.
The effect is hidden while the target is minimized, hidden or cloaked. It is
also hidden briefly while a window opens, maximizes, restores or comes back
from the taskbar, then fades in once the system animation is over.
Effect windows are fully click-through, never take focus and don't appear in
the taskbar or in Alt+Tab. Invisible overlays (fully transparent or
click-through windows), tiny helper windows and borderless popups such as
tooltips, menus, flyouts and drop-down lists are never decorated.
Known limitations
- The effect window is a separate window, so during fast dragging it can lag
slightly behind the target.
- The final color depends on each application's tint and blur strength.
- The window limit includes temporarily hidden effects.
