Underwater Ripple

Installation

$ pnpm dlx shadcn@latest add @remocn/underwater-ripple

Usage

UnderwaterRipple is a wrapper. Put a scene inside it and every pixel is read through a moving water surface: the picture bends along the slope of the field, and where the water bends hardest the colour channels separate a little, the way light does through a real surface.

import { UnderwaterRipple } from "@/components/remocn/underwater-ripple";
 
export const MyScene = () => (
  <UnderwaterRipple>
    <Scene />
  </UnderwaterRipple>
);

The loop closes by construction

speed is not a rate, it is a count: how many complete cycles the water goes through over the composition. Keep it a whole number and the last frame hands back to the first with nothing to hide — put the section on repeat and there is no seam to find.

That is also why the filter reads durationInFrames rather than seconds. Inside a Sequence it picks up that sequence's length, so a ten-second ambient hold and a two-second beat each close on their own.

A fractional speed still renders, it simply will not loop.

What to reach for it for

Surface out of the water

The arrival. The scene starts deep under a heavy ripple and settles into stillness over a second and a half — motion that resolves rather than motion that merely stops.

import { interpolate, useCurrentFrame } from "remotion";
import { UnderwaterRipple } from "@/components/remocn/underwater-ripple";
 
export const Opening = () => {
  const frame = useCurrentFrame();
  const amplitude = interpolate(frame, [0, 46], [34, 0], {
    extrapolateRight: "clamp",
  });
 
  return (
    <UnderwaterRipple amplitude={amplitude} speed={3}>
      <Scene />
    </UnderwaterRipple>
  );
};

The preview sinks back at the end so that it loops; a real opening would settle at 0 and stay there. At amplitude={0} the scene passes through untouched, so there is nothing to tear down afterwards.

Water behind, type in front

The more useful shape in practice. Wrap only the backdrop and leave the type outside the wrapper: the water moves, the words stay perfectly crisp. Refraction is the one thing in this pack you almost never want on your own copy.

import { AbsoluteFill } from "remotion";
import { UnderwaterRipple } from "@/components/remocn/underwater-ripple";
 
export const Scene = () => (
  <AbsoluteFill>
    <UnderwaterRipple amplitude={14} scale={0.8} speed={2}>
      <PoolBackdrop />
    </UnderwaterRipple>
    <AbsoluteFill>{/* headline stays sharp out here */}</AbsoluteFill>
  </AbsoluteFill>
);

Props

Notes

The field is a closed-form sum of three travelling waves whose temporal phases are whole multiples of the base cycle, and the displacement is its exact analytic gradient rather than a sampled difference. Nothing is simulated forward from the previous frame, so any frame can be rendered in isolation and parallel workers cannot drift apart.

It never sweeps. The whole surface moves at once, so there is no front crossing the frame and no direction to the effect — which is what lets it sit on a scene for a minute without becoming an event.

The filter expects a full-bleed scene. It reads pixels from a displaced coordinate, so where the scene is transparent it has nothing to bend and the untouched original shows through underneath — put a background inside the wrapper rather than behind it.

In browsers without html-in-canvas the scene renders untouched. CSS cannot read a pixel from anywhere but where it is, and a wobbling blur would be a different effect wearing this one's name.