Driftfield Studio Screensaver

Every field boils down to the same thing: at any point on screen it answers which way should a particle here go. The noise fields answer with 3D simplex noise read as an angle, curl, warped or layered in octaves. The physics fields answer with real equations — potential flow past a cylinder, the dipole field, inverse-square gravity, a Keplerian accretion flow. Two fields position their particles directly instead: the Lorenz system integrated per particle, and the de Jong map iterated as points.

Each frame, every particle reads the direction beneath it, accelerates toward it with damping, and draws a short segment from where it was to where it is. Segments are bucketed by colour and stroke width and stroked as batched paths, which is what lets four thousand particles run at full frame rate. The previous frame is faded toward the background in banked steps rather than every frame, because at the tiny alphas long trails need an 8-bit channel would otherwise round straight back and the fade would stall.

Blend lerps a second field’s direction into the first. It is deliberately a plain lerp and not a renormalise, because several fields vary their magnitude on purpose — a black hole speeds up near the horizon, orbital charges really accelerate into a well — and that variation is worth carrying through. Both fields stay seeded, both get their per-frame tick, and both get to consume particles, so blending a black hole into anything still eats what crosses the horizon.

Colour is assigned from a very low-frequency noise field at spawn time, so neighbouring particles share a hue and the picture bands into painted regions instead of confetti. A preset applies a field, palette, seed and every slider at once; they were each picked from a render, not guessed, and exist because a random roll lands on a dull frame often enough to be worth a curated floor.