CSS Background Animations

cool, But the many paint calls happen ~ during animation

For this example and many others, the “from” keyframe is not needed. This works just as well:

@keyframes animatedBackground {
    to { background-position-x:100%; }
}

Very nice tutorial. Your article, and MaxArt’s comment, encouraged me to create my own version, with parallax effect:

Demo:
http://demo.cmorales.es/background-animation/prefixed.html

Tutorial (in Spanish):
http://cmorales.es/tutorial/fondo-animado-con-css3/

great tutorial..going to try it for sure :)

where do you put the first piece of code?

Hey David,

This is indeed an awesome post. I tried it and it felt really cool.

However, when i expanded the width to say 1000 or 2000 to fit the screen width, the animation restarts from the 1st frame creating a start effect after some seconds and it doesn’t look like a seamless flow of animation. I hope you got me.

Try increasing the width and reducing the animation time(seconds). :)

I had the same problem with the stutter when the image reached the end and started over (as described by Priyank Rathod). The problem is either the width of the div or the image itself. You have to create the image in such a way that when it reaches the end within its div (or whatever – in my case it was a TD), it looks exactly as it would as if it were still at the beginning. You essentially have to define the width of the div and create the image to be the exact same width – minus the borders of the div – and the left side of the image has to connect to the right side seamlessly. (I also removed the width and height specs from the css but not sure if that made a difference.)

Nice trick, looking awesome to me.

What about the animation done in background all over the page. I means if Image goes smaller then the size of monitor then maybe some trouble will happen.

apology, I came out excellent animation, unfortunately you can only see in firefox, and I can not see it or tablet or chrome, there is a kit for the other browsers, or in this case you could do, you and I hope your answer is urgent

why this is not working in chrome? can anybody explain? only working in the FF. Thanks in advance.

ops. fixed it :)

@-webkit-keyframes animatedBackground{
	from { background-position: 0 0; }
	to { background-position: 100% 0; }
}

how fool i was. thanks for this David. much appreciated.

Cool, but on old computers like mine it goes 90% CPU

I have tried this out with an animation that extends the full width of the browser it works fine unless your on a big screen when you extend it outwards to full width it then goes from left to right! How do I stop that from happening?
Thanks,

Hi, I used this code on my website’s footer and it works perfectly except it stops for a bit after a while as if it’s starting again. I’m not sure why, anyone can help me fix this bug? Check the dark bottom footer: http://www.alpinaweb.com.br/v1/

I want it to look very smooth. Thanks a lot.

Here’s one way to stop the animation skipping if you are using a larger div with a width of 100% document size:

Set the div’s css background-size property to a multiple of the div’s width that is close to the image’s width.

For example, with a div width of 1265px, I set:

background-size: 2530px;

2530px = 1265px x 2, which is slightly larger than my image width of 2247px.

If you use a responsive layout, you’ll need to set background-size using javascript each time the document is re-sized.

Is it possible to use translate(x,y) on this?

This is fantastic & very useful method however when using large background images with more than 60s animation time the animation becomes really really choppy… I’m trying to use translate(x,y) but have been able to apply it to only one image but it would be so great if it can be applied to all backgrounds to get a really smooth animation.

Hi,

when using

@keyframes animatedBackground {
	to { background-position: 100% 0; }
}

you may get 2 problems. The animation skipping when it loops and the speed of the animation is depending on the size of the window/element.

I recommend using:

@keyframes animatedBackground {
	to { background-position: 250 0; }
}

where 250px is the width of the picture.
This way it will loop seamless and the animation won’t be faster on smaller screens.

NOTE: If you want to use this on a 100% width element (such as the entire background of your site), you need to make a small modification.

The width of your container should be 100% (ie. the body in this case).
The ‘to’ position of the keyframe animation needs to be set to the negative value (if scrolling left, otherwise positive value) of the width of your image. This will prevent ‘glitching’ when the image reaches the end of it’s “wrap”, but the container still has space left over.

For instance:

@-webkit-keyframes animatedBackground {
    from { background-position: 0 0; }
    to { background-position: -2336px 0; }
}
.main-pane { 
    width: 100%; 
    height: 768px;
    background-image: url(../img/blurred_clouds2.png);
    background-position: 0px 0px;
    background-repeat: repeat-x;

    animation: animatedBackground 4s linear infinite;
    -ms-animation: animatedBackground 4s linear infinite;
    -moz-animation: animatedBackground 4s linear infinite;
    -webkit-animation: animatedBackground 4s linear infinite;
}

Hope that helps anyone trying to do this on width: 100% element.

quick question! does this CSS works on phone? Thanks!

Hi David
Great resource you have here helping guys with codes et all.
I tried to add the animated background to heade section of css style on my website, ( width is 960px height 300px) it didnt work and i tried the css multiple animated background it didnt help.
I am using adobe dreamweaver 4.
Please kindly do assist

Nice,

I’m experimenting with it… Using

@keyframes animatedBackground {
	from { background-position: -55% 90%; }
	to { background-position: 155% 90%; }
}

I used negative and over 100 percentage to get the image out of screen-border. Will try the other methods later.

And i used

@media (min-width: 1100px) {

 }

To only use it on big screens.

Still experimenting… But fun..

Is there no way to stop the image from reloading and restarting the animation?
It should be as smooth as the demo but it wont work with “real” clouds.

Is there a way to make the background image clickable so that if clicked it will go to a linked page or site?

There any way to stop the animation with JS?

I need to add a button to stop the animation background, I could help with an example. Thank you very much =)

OMG thank you ! but on old computers like mine it goes 90% CPU

Personally I feel this example misleads the reader. It appears to show a background seamlessly repeating using this css. Only after trying to use it myself (and time spent trying to figure out why my background was jumping at the end, unlike the example) did I discover that effect comes from a specially chosen div width and background image combination (the displayed div width is 560px and first and last 560px of the image are identical) – as from now reading the comments was previously found by Priyank Rathod. I personally would never post such code without indicating the special conditions which give the effect.

I have tried this out with an animation that extends the full width of the browser it works fine unless your on a big screen when you extend it outwards to full width it then goes from left to right! How do I stop that from happening?
Thanks,

Hi, OMG thank you ! but on old computers like mine it goes 75% CPU

Hi, OMG thank you ! but on old computers like mine it goes 75% CPU. This cause some problem