BallEngine

Flow Field 3D:
Particles that move like smoke

Tens of thousands of particles sliding through a field with no sources and no sinks, so they drift in sheets instead of collecting into blobs.
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Flow Field 3D is being built right now

The engine, the physics and the look are done enough to watch. What is not finished is everything around them: the settings, the presets and the export path. So we shipped it as a preview instead of sitting on it.

The order is decided by these votes rather than by us, and the most-voted modes go first. If this is the one you want, say so.

What you can do now
Open it in the studio and watch a full run, with sound, exactly as it stands today.
What is held back
Settings, randomize and export. The preview runs on our defaults so every viewer judges the same version.
When it ships
The most-voted unfinished mode is the one we take next.

What Flow Field 3D does

Tens of thousands of particles sliding through a divergence-free noise field, so they drift like smoke and never clump or drain away.

Flow Field 3D moves tens of thousands of GPU particles through a curl-noise velocity field. The field is the curl of a noise vector potential, which makes it divergence-free by construction, and that single property is the whole trick.

A divergence-free field has no sources and no sinks. Nothing can pile up anywhere and nothing can drain away, so particles slide past each other in silky incompressible sheets rather than collecting into blobs the way a naive noise field makes them. The result reads as smoke.

On top of the flow sits a beat response. A musical cue fires an outward shock and a spike of turbulence, so the smoke is pushed and stirred in time with the track before settling back into its drift.

How a run plays out

The exact sequence the engine runs in this mode, from the first frame to the moment the run resolves.
  1. 1.

    A noise potential defines the field

    The velocity field is the curl of a noise vector potential, evaluated in a fragment shader. Taking the curl is what guarantees the field has no sources or sinks.

  2. 2.

    Particles are advected through it

    Each particle simply follows the local velocity. There is no collision and no interaction between particles; the structure comes entirely from the field.

  3. 3.

    Lifetimes recycle the cloud

    Particles have a lifetime budget and are reseeded when it expires, which keeps the cloud from thinning as particles drift toward the edges of the region.

  4. 4.

    The beat pushes it

    A musical cue fires an outward shock plus a turbulence spike, so the smoke reacts visibly and then relaxes back into its underlying drift.

Every control in Flow Field 3D

These are the settings this mode adds on top of the shared physics, visual, audio, and export controls. Names match the studio sidebar exactly.

The flow

  • The Flow

The scale and speed of the noise field. Larger features give long sweeping sheets, smaller ones give a busier, more turbulent look.

Particles

  • Particles
  • Particle Count

Count is density. Smoke needs a high count to read as a continuous medium rather than as a swarm of dots.

Look

  • Look
  • Colour By
  • Ramp Start
  • Ramp End

Colouring by velocity is what makes the sheets legible, because it separates the fast cores of the flow from the slow edges.

Beat response

  • Beat Response
  • Pulse On Beat
  • Own Sounds
  • Pulse Sound

The pulse is what stops a continuous flow being ambient wallpaper. It gives the run discrete events tied to the music.

Why Flow Field 3D videos hold attention

What keeps people watching this mechanic.

Smoke is endlessly watchable

Fluid-like motion holds attention with no premise at all, which is why the format works as background and as foreground.

The pulse gives it structure

Beat-driven shocks turn a continuous drift into a sequence of events the viewer can anticipate.

Nothing ever clumps

Because the field is divergence-free, the cloud never degenerates into blobs, so it looks as good at forty seconds as at four.

It reads at any size

Large-scale sheets survive a phone screen, so the motion carries even where fine detail would not.

Videos you can make in this mode

Each of these is a different configuration of the same mode, so one setup session produces a batch of related uploads.

Ambient smoke

A slow large-scale field with no pulse. Pure background content with no ending.

Beat-pulsed

Pulse On Beat with a track that has clear hits, so the cloud is shocked repeatedly.

Velocity-coloured

Colour by speed so the fast cores of the flow separate from the slow edges.

Dense volume

A very high particle count so the cloud reads as continuous smoke rather than as points.

Turbulent

A small-scale field for a busy, agitated look rather than long sheets.

Two-tone ramp

A strong colour ramp between two brand colours, which makes an abstract visual recognisably yours.

Make your first Flow Field 3D video

The order that works. Following it out of sequence usually means retuning settings you already set.
  1. 1.

    Set the field scale

    Large features for sweeping sheets, small for turbulence. This is the character of the whole video.

  2. 2.

    Raise the particle count

    Smoke needs density. Push the count until the cloud reads as a medium rather than as dots.

  3. 3.

    Colour by velocity

    Speed-based colour is what makes the internal structure of the flow visible.

  4. 4.

    Add the pulse

    Turn on the beat response so the run has events instead of being one continuous state.

  5. 5.

    Watch a long run

    Check that the cloud still looks right after a minute. It should, because the field cannot clump, but the framing may drift.

Settings that make the difference

  1. Density is the difference between smoke and confetti. If it looks like dots, raise the count before changing anything else.
  2. Colour by velocity almost always beats a flat colour here, since the flow has no edges of its own to define it.
  3. The pulse is what makes this a music video rather than a screensaver. Do not skip it on a rhythmic track.
  4. Large-scale fields survive being watched on a phone. Fine turbulence often does not.
  5. This mode has no ending, which makes it a good candidate for a long export or a loop.

What breaks a run

  1. A low particle count, which reveals that the smoke is made of individual points.
  2. A flat colour, which leaves the cloud with no internal structure to look at.
  3. No beat response on a rhythmic track, which wastes the only link between the audio and the visual.
  4. Very fine field detail on a small canvas, where the structure is lost entirely.

Why divergence-free matters

The obvious way to build a flow field is to sample a noise function directly as a velocity. It works for about five seconds. Because an arbitrary noise field has sources and sinks, particles drain out of some regions and pile into others, and the cloud degenerates into clumps and empty space.

Taking the curl of a noise vector potential produces a field that is divergence-free by construction. There is no point in the volume where flow accumulates and none where it disappears, so the particle density stays even no matter how long the simulation runs.

That is what makes the motion read as smoke. Real fluids are close to incompressible at these speeds, and the thing your eye recognises as fluid motion is precisely the sliding of sheets past each other without accumulation. Get the divergence right and the look follows.

Giving a continuous flow some events

A curl-noise flow is inherently eventless. It drifts beautifully and nothing in particular ever happens, which makes it excellent as background and weak as a video with a reason to watch it now.

The beat response adds two things at once. An outward shock displaces particles from the impulse point, which is a large visible motion. A turbulence spike briefly increases the small-scale detail of the field, which changes the texture rather than the shape.

Together they produce a reaction that is both immediately visible and short-lived, so the cloud is pushed and stirred and then relaxes back into its drift. That relaxation is why the pulse can fire on every beat without the visual becoming a strobe.

Flow Field 3D questions

Modes that pair with Flow Field 3D

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