Particle Field
Up to a million particles, simulated entirely on the graphics card.
Heavy · GPU experiment — it only starts on a click, so it doesn't load your machine for nothing.
Move the pointer through the particles to push them aside. Hold down to pull the cloud in.
A slowly turning cloud of particles that lives entirely on the GPU — the CPU never touches a single one. The pointer pushes them aside; holding a button pulls the cloud in.
- WebGL 2
- GPGPU
- ABC flow
How it works
Every particle's position and velocity is stored in float textures. Each frame a shader reads the previous state and writes the next one, so updating hundreds of thousands of particles is a single draw call. The motion comes from an Arnold–Beltrami–Childress flow: it is divergence-free, so the cloud keeps its density instead of collapsing into a few points.
Particles are drawn as additive points into a half-float buffer that fades a little every frame — that's the trail — and then tone-mapped with a vignette. If the machine can't keep up, the engine steps down to fewer particles by itself, and climbs back when there's headroom.
Want something like this on your own site?
Motion and WebGL are part of what I do — we'll work out what fits your site while keeping it fast.
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