Cloud Particles

Volumetric drifting clouds as a decorative backdrop. Each cloud is a radial-gradient ellipse pushed through a five-pass SVG turbulence filter — body, cool underside, soft shadow, deep shadow — and translated across `130vw`.

decorativeclientuiv1.1.0

Preview

Cloud Particles — live renderaceternity-cloudparticles--default

Rendered from the story the storybook (a11y) CI gate runs axe against — the preview can't show something that hasn't been verified.

Install

Two equivalent paths — the URL works in any shadcn-CLI setup; the alias works once you've registered @interlace in your components.json.

Via shadcn URL
npx shadcn@latest add https://ds.interlace.tools/r/cloud-particles.json
With the @interlace alias
npx shadcn@latest add @interlace/cloud-particles

History

This component is at v1.1.0, first shipped in @interlace/ui 1.0.0. The version is stamped as a banner into the file the install writes, so the copy in your tree says which one you have — compare it with the number above before deciding whether to re-run the install.

@interlace/ui 1.1.01 entry

  • Changedpatch

    Six defects found by upgrading a real consumer, plus five found by reading the components closely enough to document them. **Meteors' glow never painted.** It read var(--color-meteor-glow) while its cssVars declare --meteor-glow; --color-* is the Tailwind @theme namespace and only cssVars.theme populates it, so the whole box-shadow was invalid at computed-value time. **This was broken only for registry consumers** — our own docs site hand-declares the --color- form. **ArticleCard cropped 28% off every cover.** h-44 is 176px; at a ~302px tile that is a 1.72:1 box against a 2.381:1 image. Now aspect-[1000/420] — the ratio the card already declared on its <img>. It also gains a renderImage slot, because every Next.js consumer was re-patching the same line to use next/image and the design system cannot depend on it. **BorderBeam and StarsBackground had no aria-hidden at all** — six purely decorative nodes a screen reader walked. **CloudParticles defaulted bodyColor to currentColor**, painting volumetric clouds in the inherited text colour. **NumberTicker gains notation**, because six-figure metrics overflow a tile at 320px. Also: SheetCompose and DialogCompose each mounted a second backdrop, so a composed dialog dimmed the page twice as much as the hand-composed tree the docs show; Accordion dropped className on the animated Panel; Tooltip accepted delay and discarded it; PopoverAnchor was a second trigger. **useReducedMotion was one frame late.** The canonical useState(false) plus effect returns false on the first render, so every gated component painted one frame of exactly the motion the user turned off. useSyncExternalStore reads during render and closes that on client renders; on hydration the server cannot know the preference, which is what the stylesheet reset is for. Badge drops 'use client' — verified with a real server-component build.

Import

Single named export.

Public API
import { CloudParticles } from '@/components/ui/aceternity/cloud-particles';

Anatomy

Extracted from the primitive's JSDoc header. The source is the only documentation that can't drift.

CloudParticles                   (div — data-slot="cloud-particles",
                                    aria-hidden, pointer-events-none)
    ├─ style                       (per-instance `{filterId}-drift` keyframe)
    ├─ svg                         (data-slot="cloud-particles-filter" —
    │                               2× feTurbulence, then 4 displaced layers
    │                               composited through feMerge)
    └─ div ×count                  (data-slot="cloud-particles-cloud")
        └─ div                     (data-slot="cloud-particles-shape")
Layout is a deterministic golden-ratio walk (`buildClouds`), not
`Math.random()`, so server and client agree and the same props always
produce the same field. `count` is clamped to `mobileCount` below
`mobileBreakpoint`. Both the keyframe and the clouds render only after
mount, so SSR emits the filter and nothing else.

API reference

Parsed from the type declarations in the source — the same file the install writes into your tree, so this table can't drift from the component you get.

CloudParticlesProps

PropTypeDescription
countnumberNumber of cloud particles to render. On viewports narrower than `mobileBreakpoint` this is clamped to `mobileCount` to protect the GPU budget on phones. @default 3
mobileCountnumberMaximum cloud count on viewports narrower than `mobileBreakpoint`. @default 2
mobileBreakpointnumberViewport width (px) below which `mobileCount` applies. @default 768
minSpeednumberSlowest drift duration, in seconds (each cloud picks a value in `[minSpeed, maxSpeed]`). Larger = slower. @default 150
maxSpeednumberFastest drift duration, in seconds. @default 250
minScalenumberSmallest cloud scale (1 = native 320×140px). @default 0.5
maxScalenumberLargest cloud scale. @default 0.9
bodyColorstringMain cloud-body color. Any CSS color is valid; defaults resolve through a CSS custom property so the design system owns the palette. Defaults to `--scrim-foreground` — white in both schemes — because a volumetric fill is a material, not a mark, and must not invert with the surrounding text colour. Pass `currentColor` explicitly if you genuinely want the clouds to track the inherited foreground; see the file header for why that is the wrong default. @default "var(--cloud-body-color, var(--scrim-foreground))"
undersideColorstringCool underside tint that reads as light-from-above. Falls back to the theme's muted-foreground token. @default "var(--cloud-underside-color, var(--muted-foreground, currentColor))"
shadowColorstringSoft drop-shadow color beneath each cloud. @default "var(--cloud-shadow-color, var(--muted-foreground, currentColor))"
undersideOpacitynumberOpacity of the underside tint layer (0–1). @default 0.08
shadowOpacitynumberOpacity of the soft-shadow layer (0–1). @default 0.12
deepShadowOpacitynumberOpacity of the deep-shadow layer (0–1). @default 0.08

Accessibility

Every story for this component is rendered headlessly and checked with axe-core (wcag2aa, wcag22aa, best-practice, ACT) on every PR. That gate has no continue-on-error, so what ships has zero known violations.

What follows is what static analysis can see. Axe cannot press a key and never sees an overlay open, so the operable-without-a-mouse claim lives in Behavior instead, where the keyboard path is replayed step by step.

Focus + keyboard behaviour
Native element semantics — no interaction layer to get wrong.
Focus ring (WCAG 2.2 SC 2.4.13)
Not focusable — no focus indicator required.
Reduced motion
Animation is gated on prefers-reduced-motion.
ARIA in the source
None — semantics come from the element or the Base UI primitive rather than hand-written ARIA.

Examples

3 more states from the same story file.

Dependencies

Base UI primitive
Native / no Base UI dependency
Lucide icons
none
NPM dependencies
none

Source

The full implementation — components/ui/aceternity/cloud-particles.tsx once installed.

469 lines · TypeScript
"use client";

import { ComponentPropsWithoutRef, useEffect, useId, useState } from "react";

// @interlace/cloud-particles v1.1.0 — Interlace design system.
// Docs, props and live preview: https://ds.interlace.tools/c/cloud-particles
// What changed since: https://ds.interlace.tools/c/cloud-particles#history
// Generated banner — keep it, the upgrade diff reads this version.

/**
 * @interlace/ui — CloudParticles
 *
 * Volumetric drifting clouds as a decorative backdrop. Each cloud is a
 * radial-gradient ellipse pushed through a five-pass SVG turbulence filter —
 * body, cool underside, soft shadow, deep shadow — and translated across
 * `130vw`.
 *
 * It is an `absolute inset-0` overlay: `aria-hidden`, `pointer-events-none`,
 * and reserving no flow space, so the consumer owns the positioned ancestor.
 *

…449 more lines…

Registry JSON

The raw registry record — what the shadcn CLI fetches.