Published 2026-09-06

Canonical: https://pilobol.us/effects/spore-drift.html

# 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*.

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