Themes

Themes is where your controller stops looking like the one in the box. You can repaint it part by part, drop a finished theme on it, or give the shell a moving skin. Whatever you pick follows your pad everywhere the app draws it, and onto the overlay you stream. All of it is free.

Overview

Open Themes from the sidebar, under Effects. The pad in the middle is the one you are styling, and it is live: click a part to select it, drag to turn the model round, and use the view buttons above it to check the front, the angled three-quarter, the back, or how it will look over a game.

A design is saved per controller model. Styling your Xbox pad leaves your DualSense alone, which is what you want when the two sit on the same desk and only one of them is the one you play with.

Paint, not tint

The colour controls repaint a part rather than tinting it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A tint multiplies the pad's existing colour, so it can only ever deepen or hue-shift what is already there - every design built that way comes out some flavour of dark, and a white pad is impossible. Paint replaces the colour while keeping the moulding, the shading and the printed glyphs, so pale and pastel finishes work as well as dark ones. Tint is still available for the cases where keeping the pad's real colour underneath is the point.

Colouring parts

Quick style sets two things at once: a shell colour and a controls colour. That is the fastest way to a finished-looking pad, and for most people it is the whole job.

For anything more specific, click the part on the model. Face buttons, sticks, the d-pad, bumpers, triggers, the touchpad, the system buttons and the rear paddles are all separately addressable, and the panel tells you how many parts you have styled so far. All parts expands the full list if you would rather work from names than from the model.

A part with no equivalent on the current controller simply resolves away rather than painting something wrong, so a design that names a mute button costs nothing on a pad that has not got one.

Presets

The gallery under the stage carries two groups.

Animated comes first: 64 moving shell skins. They range from quiet materials that read as an expensive finish - Marble, Brushed Steel, Nacre, Figured Wood, Craquelure - through weather like Rainfall, Snowfall and Sandstorm, to the loud end with Hyperdrive, Reactor Core, Inferno and Galaxy.

Static follows: 61 fixed palettes, from plain hardware finishes like Gunmetal, Blackout and Racing White through jewel tones and era pieces such as Vaporwave, Blueprint and Phosphor.

Applying a preset never edits it. If you want to change one, the editor duplicates it first, so the original is always there to go back to.

Animated skins

An animated skin paints the shell with a moving pattern instead of a flat colour. It is drawn procedurally on your GPU rather than played back as a video, which is why it works on every controller model with no artwork per pad, and why it costs almost nothing to run.

Open the Animation tab to tune one:

• Speed - how fast the pattern moves.
• Intensity - how strongly it takes over from the painted colour underneath. Lower values let the shell colour show through.
• Scale - how large the pattern features are.
• Three colours - primary, secondary and accent. The accent is also used for the button press flash, so a press reads as part of the same design.
• Reactive - on the effects that support it, the pattern responds to what you are pressing. Off by default, because a reactive shell is a choice.

Every effect is built to the same rules: nothing strobes, nothing loops visibly, and the pattern is never allowed to hide a control. Face buttons, sticks and the d-pad stay findable, because a skin that makes the pad unreadable is a broken skin however good it looks.

Press effects

The Input effects tab controls what a control does when you use it.

• Press colour and strength - the colour a pressed control lights up, and how brightly.
• Fade - how long the light takes to die away after you let go.
• Press animation - whether a pressed control also scales or pulses, or just lights.

These follow your theme onto every pad the app draws, so a press looks the same on the Dashboard as it does on your overlay.

Saving and sharing

Save current stores the design under a name of your own, alongside the presets.

Export file writes it out so you can back it up or send it to someone.

The theme code is the quick way to share. Copy the code from a theme, send it to someone, and they paste it into the box and press Use code. A code carries the whole design: colours, press effects and the animated skin with its settings. An older build that does not know about animated skins will read the colours and show a static pad rather than refusing the code.

Where your theme shows up

• Every page in the app that draws your controller, including the Dashboard, Mapping, Sticks and the Get Started tour.
• The stream overlay, so what you designed is what your viewers see.

Reset design in the top right puts the current model back to how it shipped. It affects only the model you are looking at.

Troubleshooting

The pad looks unchanged after applying a theme. Check which model the dropdown above the stage is set to. Designs are per model, and styling the Xbox pad will not change a DualSense.

The animation is not moving. Confirm an animated preset is actually selected rather than a static one, and that the Animation tab shows an effect rather than None. An effect will also idle while the window is off screen, which is deliberate: there is no point animating a pad nobody is looking at.

The skin looks different on my other controller. It will. The pattern is measured against each model's own shape rather than drawn as fixed artwork, so the same effect wraps a DualSense and an Xbox pad differently. That is the mechanism that lets one skin work on every pad.