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Medium2026

Flow Field

Ten thousand strokes riding a simplex-noise field.

Move the pointer to stir the flow. Click for a shockwave, hold to pull it in.

Thousands of short-lived strokes drift along a slowly changing noise field. The pointer stirs a whirlpool, pressing pulls the flow in and sends out a shockwave.

Under the hood
  • Canvas 2D
  • Simplex noise

How it works

The flow comes from 3D simplex noise (x, y and time): one direction vector per cell of a grid. That's a few thousand noise samples per frame — not one per particle — and the particles read the grid bilinearly. The trails come from fading the previous frame towards the background every frame.

Near the pointer, a swirling and a repelling component are added to each particle's velocity; with the button held, the repulsion becomes attraction. All of it is plain Canvas 2D, in three batched draw calls.

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Next experiment
Flow Field — KineticForm