Flow field

Thousands of particles, one invisible current, and a picture you can keep.

Every particle on the stage is reading the same invisible field of currents and drifting along it, leaving a faint trail behind. The trails pile up into something none of them drew on their own. Pick a palette, ask for a new seed until you like what you see, then save it as a wallpaper. The seed in the corner is the whole picture: the same number always draws the same image. Everything happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

How it works

The current is a field of simplex noise, a way of making smooth random landscapes that was designed for exactly this. Every point on the stage has an angle, and every particle simply turns to face whatever angle it is standing on and takes a small step. No particle knows about any other one.

Saving re-draws your seed at 2560 by 1440 rather than stretching what is on screen, so the file is sharp at full size. It is made and downloaded in your browser, so nothing is sent anywhere.