Spore Drift

One of the background animations in rotation on this site is a field of drifting spores, carried along a current rather than seeking each other out or growing a network.

Each point follows a curl-noise flow field — a technique borrowed from fluid simulation that guarantees the flow has no sources or sinks, so motion reads as air currents rather than particles converging on or fleeing a point. Trails fade quickly, so this is the most ambient of the effects on this site: loose, brief, and never accumulating into a fixed structure.

Credits

Curl noise as a flow-field technique for particle motion is described in Bridson, Hourihan, and Nordenstam's 2007 paper Curl-Noise for Procedural Fluid Flow.

See this effect running full-size in the effects gallery →