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Background Animations Using MooTools

By David Walsh on April 25, 2011

Updated 4/25/2011: The background animation has been updated to work well with Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and more efficiently with every other browser. This was accomplished by adding the wait property to the animation, and using an initial setStyle assignment to work around an IE8 background-position bug.

One of the sweet effects made easy by JavaScript frameworks like MooTools and jQuery is animation. I ran across this great jQuery tutorial that walks you through animating a background image of a page. Here's a quick MooTools code snippet that shows you how you can add this sweet effect to any element on a page.

View Demo

The CSS

#animate-area	{ 
	background-image: url(clouds.png);
	background-position: 0px 0px;
	background-repeat: repeat-x;
}

The first step is assigning the image as a background image for our given container. Be sure to repeat the background horizontally!

The MooTools JavaScript

window.addEvent("domready",function() {
	//settings
	var duration = 40000;
	var length = 2000;
	var count = 0;
	
	var tweener;
	
	// Executes the standard tween on the background position
	var run = function() {
		tweener.tween("background-position", "-" + (++count * length) + "px 0px");
	};
	
	// Defines the tween
	tweener = $("animate-area").setStyle("background-position", "0px 0px").set("tween", { 
		duration: duration, 
		transition: Fx.Transitions.linear,
		onComplete: run,
		link: "cancel"
	});
	
	// Starts the initial run of the transition
	run();	
});

The first step, as always is getting our settings ready for the show. The next piece is putting the animation function in place. We increment the negative background left position counter calculation to keep the show rolling. Last step is playing the show!

View Demo

Make sure the animation speed is very slow and subtle -- a rapid background speed could make your users pass out. On the other hand, implementing it tastefully will make your website unique.

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Discussion

senshikaze
awesome look, though i can see some people going overboard with this.
Steven Schrab
What? No Parallax effect? :P
Tyler Abell
This seems cool but may difficult to successfully implement into an effective design. It seems quite limited as well but don’t get me wrong, it’s a great way to animate a background with the simplicity of moo tools. I would suggest looking at snapjay.com and the code be hide it at code.snapjay.com…
cake
Hi,
nice work. Could you convert sich special nice effect from jQuery to Mootools. This is an awesome effect.
http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax.html
Alex
@cake
There is a plugin for mootools called mparallax, but its developer’s website (Piksite.com) is down for some reason….
Paul Winslow
I’ve been meaning to look into fading background images from one-to-another with jquery/mootools.. don’t suppose you’d be willing to show how that’d work? Cheers, David.
Tyler Abell
@Paul Winslow:

Paul you should check the site I provided above: code.snapjay.com

You may find that jquery useful, but on snapjay.com he uses a background fader. I will be writing a article on this later tonight. I will let you know…
Jeroen
Hi David! Cool to see this work in Mootools! I’m using a Jquery version of this on my company site (Mediashake.nl). Works pretty good, but I wish I could save it’s state so the clouds won’t restart for each new page or refresh… any idea’s?
Adriaan Nel
I agree with Paul Winslow…fading background images into each other would make an awesome experiment!
Kepler W.
Hello David!

Great thanks for your acceptance for the work ! Your are Cool!

Regards!

Kepler
Tim
Nice sample, parallax version would be nice too ;-)
To bad that subpixel movment is not possible (is it?), for slow & smoother animations. Can´t wait until Canvas is possible on everyone’s browser.
Richard
Great work indeed!
Amos
Wouldn’t it be a lighter and simpler solution to have a GIF image instead?
derdummkopf
sorry david,

ie7 shows no animation
Bob Cravens
I agree that you want the animation subtle. This is after all the header and not the main content. I have an animated cloud on my site. This is a link to the site with the animated cloud and also a tutorial….

http://blog.bobcravens.com/2009/07/05/jQueryAnimation.aspx
chris
Hi David,

IE 8 = no animation :-(

greetings
chris
Roark
Hi David!

Great tutorial as usual…

Please would you give me a hand in 1.11’a fying this code? Joomla! 1.5 as you may know uses the older library so when I create a Joomla site I need to use 1.11 compatible code.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
Roark

Roark

Damn I’m good… :)

window.addEvent('domready',function() {
//settings
var duration = 5000;
var length = 2000;
var count = 0;
		
var fx2 = new Fx.Style($('bannerwrap'),'background-position', {duration: duration, transition: Fx.Transitions.linear, wait:false});
		
//showtime!
var run = function() {
  fx2.start('-' + (++count * length) + 'px 24px');
};
run();
run.periodical(duration);
});

You feel better when you do it yourself, only lost a couple hours getting it right.
damn ‘wait’ option

tim_keffer
Hello,
I get where the background: coding goes, but where does the the action content lay in??

Thank you !!
George Felix
Hello, im test this script running Version 1.11 under ie8 but have error push is null, maybe anybody know solution?

Thanks in advance. =)
Chris TC
I tried this code successfully with a background positioned on top of a div, but when i try position it on bottom, it seems like the code make it go up little by little, funny but... wasn't really expected. Is there a way to correct this effect ?
Andy
oncomplete: run is a very clever way to do it, nice! I would have gone with some nasty settimeout solution.

Brad

For everyone asking for parallax, it’s very simple. I’ve put the functions into a class to make this easier:

bgScroller = new Class({
	
	Implements: [Events, Options],
	
	options: {
		duration: 40000
	},
	
	tweener: null,
	length: 0,
	count: 0,
	verticalPosition: null,
	
	run: function() {
		this.tweener.tween('background-position', ('-' + (++this.count * this.length) + 'px ' + this.verticalPosition));
	},
	
	initialize: function(element, options){
        this.setOptions(options);
		this.tweener = element;
		this.length = this.tweener.getSize().x;
		this.verticalPosition = this.tweener.getStyle("background-position").split(" ")[1];
		this.tweener.setStyle("background-position", ("0px " + this.verticalPosition));
		this.tweener.set('tween', { 
			duration: this.options.duration, 
			transition: Fx.Transitions.linear,
			onComplete: this.run.bind(this),
			wait: false
		});
		this.run();
    }
	
});

Then all you have to do is set separate instances of the class to each layer:

window.addEvent("domready", function() {
	var frontScroller = new bgScroller($("front"), { duration: 9000 });
	var middleScroller = new bgScroller($("middle"), { duration: 85000 });
	var backScroller = new bgScroller($("back"), { duration: 55000 });
});

David Walsh
This is great Brad, but I had a small mistep in my original code. wait: false should be link: "cancel"
Brad
Ah, yes, I see. Easy mistake, since wait is part of the MooTools system. It’s just an extra for Class.chain.

Feel free to edit that into my comment.

I put together a demo, but I won’t be able to get it online until later.
Brad
http://bradleywilkie.com/testSites/backgroundScroller/

byt
Hello I need help getting the background. I use a joomla template and I am not able to.
To place the image to and no problem.
But do not get it to move.
I use CSS file.
Cheta
Can’t make it to work with IE 7,8 9 . Works fine with chrome and ff. IE gives error that object doesn’t support the property.. Please help me ..
Toadward
Hi David,

thanks for the tutorial, it’s great.

A little problem is the use of “(++count * length)” to define the tweening target. As this runs endless some desktop browsers are stopping the animation effect after some minutes.
I think it would be better to set the target to “length” and reset the background-position in the “run” function.
anand
hello!
Thanks for the tutorials.
I am looking for codes of js,html5,css3 without flash for the same animation. (I mean i want to make a animation with 3 languages) Can anybody please help me? thanks in advance.

Background Animations Using MooTools

The CSS

The MooTools JavaScript

Recent Features

7 Essential JavaScript Functions

Conquering Impostor Syndrome

Incredible Demos

MooTools HTML Police: dwMarkupMarine

Redacted Font

Discussion