Deterministic animation baking. WPE Baker, the first Periodica product, models a Wallpaper Engine scene's animation math and retunes its periods until everything closes into one baked loop, look unchanged. Up to 96% less GPU load and power, even on battery.

How did Astra change the scope or ambition of what you built?

The plan was a recorder: capture a wallpaper, find where it repeats, cut a loop. Astra turned it into an engine. In days it wrote a frame-exact Vulkan offline renderer for Wallpaper Engine's undocumented format, an analytic period solver that retunes every animation into one common loop, the encoder pipeline and the power-measurement rig. A 25,599-frame bake went from 2,566 s to 214 s, so all 113 wallpapers could be baked and measured in an afternoon. That changed the goal: WPE Baker became the first application of Periodica, a deterministic animation baking engine for every screen that loops.

Your wallpaper looks like it repeats the same few seconds all day; your GPU renders every one of those frames from scratch, behind your icons. WPE Baker is the first product built on Periodica, a deterministic animation baking engine. It models the scene's entire animation math - shader equations, animation tracks, particle cycles, video timebases - and retunes their periods, within a visible-change budget you pick, until the whole scene closes into one baked video. The look stays as it was, deterministic effects baked and interactive ones kept live or left out; decoding costs almost nothing. It runs offline with no model calls and no Python, and produces a portable Wallpaper Engine project you own. Measured in the official player with A/B/B/A runs and hardware power counters: up to 96% less GPU load and power on baked scenes, trimmed mean -76%. It supports most Wallpaper Engine animated scenes today, and a baked wallpaper is cheap enough that you stop pausing it on battery. I ran it across all 113 wallpapers in my library and shipped every result. GPT-6 Astra built this for the challenge. Wallpaper Engine's scene format is undocumented, and rendering it frame-exact offline means handling hundreds of shader variants, particle systems, script controllers and video layers. Astra built a multi-threaded Vulkan offline renderer for Wallpaper Engine scenes, the analytic period solver, the layer allocator, the encoder pipeline with hardware-decode checks and the power-measurement rig: about 29,000 lines of C#, 14,000 lines of tests, 1,400+ automated checks. Then it made the pipeline fast: a 25,599-frame scene went from 2,566 s to 214 s (12x), a 671-frame scene from 108 s to 15 s (7x), and the full 78-scene library now bakes in one afternoon on a single GPU slot. Claude did the final review. Next comes state splitting, so day/night and interaction-heavy scenes bake what never changes. After that, the big one: bake at a fraction of the resolution with sub-pixel jitter, and reconstruct at playback from motion vectors solved offline, which gives the reconstruction better inputs than DLSS gets in a game - DLSS-class output from a decode that costs a fraction. Once that lands, Periodica works on any surface that loops: phone live wallpapers, lock screens, kiosks, stream backdrops. Wallpaper Engine is the first screen it runs on. Drag a Scene folder in, hit Analyze. Within a minute it tells you what it will bake.

How did Astra change the scope or ambition of what you built?

Periodica

Your wallpaper renders forever. Bake it once.

Your wallpaper renders forever. Bake it once.