Download on Patreon
There is a strange beauty in watching particles exhibit wave-particle duality characteristics, particularly when paired with some flocking awareness. Perhaps it’s the continual surprise in the interplay between order and chaos. Let’s do some particle simulations!

The Stipple plugin for After Effects is exactly what I’ve been looking for since it does simulations very quickly and so it allows me to explore ideas without any friction. Also it takes video clips as input to drive the force fields, which enables me to do loads of experiments and focus on hunting for what feels evocative. So I experimented with some different base settings for the simulations and landed on two main looks. One look has the particles a constant size and the particle color changes according to its velocity. The other look has the particle size and color change according to its velocity.

I did some fine-tuning of the force field settings and found the Image Attract Force attribute to be important in getting the feel that I was after. After some experiment, I ran with 1000 particles at 100 simulation steps per second for most scenes. Also I would tweak the playback speed of the input footage according to the needs of each scene. A weird quirk was since I was working at 3840x2160, but some of the input footage was 1920x1080, I found that I needed to scale it up to 199% instead of 200% otherwise the particles would stick to the outer edges of the frame. Watching the particles form into ephemeral shapes matches the feeling in my mind of how ideas come and go.

I've long had a fascination with the patterns that physical cymatics experiments produce. But I've always been overwhelmed by the tricky hurdles of doing cymatics, such as the Chladni plate rigging, shutter speed of the video camera, slow motion requirement, and controlling the audio in interesting ways. But then I realized that the Stipple plugin was perfectly suited for doing a simulation of cymatics. I did some research and stumbled across the Sketch Design Club: Particles tool, which allowed me to generate a bunch of patterns that had the same feel as true cymatics patterns. So I signed up to be a premium member and then exported the patterns. Then I imported them into After Effects and did some different experiments with how I handed off between the patterns, whether a hard cut or slow crossfade. I'm quite satisfied with the result and felt like I finally scratched that itch.

I was curious to experiment with some various noise patterns and see if I could jam with order and chaos. To streamline this aspect I used the Fractal Noise Browser plugin as a springboard since it has an amazing library of presets for the native Fractal Noise and Turbulent Noise effects in After Effects. I explored nearly all of the presets and created my own versions for this project. Some of these happy accidents felt like spelunking into new territories.

With my prior experience working in Maya and Blender, I was expecting for a pre-run attribute to be included within the Stipple plugin so that I can let the particles settle down from their randomized initial state before rendering out my scene. But in this context of relying on input footage, I can see how that’s a fine limitation of After Effects. So instead I had my footage start at frame 600, and then duplicated the footage and reversed it so that I could in effect hack together my own pre-run and render everything out. This required me to render out to a JPG sequence and then trim out these pre-run frames when encoding to MP4.

The ironic problem with having my own library of content is that I just get so curious and can't stop myself from trying loads of different experiments. So this is how I end up with so many variations since I've allowed my curiosity to only be limited by my compute ability. So I ended up with 205 different scenes and from there I created the "Constant Size" and "Velocity Size" simulation variations and ended up with a total of 410 scenes which needed rendering out at 3840x2160 60fps. Since After Effects is often lightly threaded when rendering (MFR enabled), I setup batch rendering via command line prompts so that I could have two instances of the AErender executable going at the same time and therefore half the total amount of render time. Before starting the renders I did some rough napkin math and realized that I needed to render the JPG frame sequences to an external drive. So I ended up rendering 2,909,661 frames (4.33TB) which took 242 hours of total render time. Ouch! Although I think that my render speed was bottlenecked by my external HDD which is the SMR type and so the sustained write speeds are limited.

After all of the scenes were rendered out to JPG sequences, I then used FFmpeg via a command line prompt to encode them into MP4 files. I decided to use FFmpeg since it renders so much faster than After Effects. After doing a few tests I realized that the particle colors were becoming seriously muted by the H264 compression. So I used the saturation filter in FFmpeg so that I could boost the color saturation and that fixed the issue. In these tests I also realized that since these particles were so simple, I could also adjust the CRF to 26 and roughly half the file size but with nearly the same level of quality. And since FFmpeg is light on memory usage, I started up 3 separate instances to batch render at once and quickly rendered out the final MP4 video clips.

If you want to make the particles appear larger in Resolume then throw the Dilate effect on there. If you wanna tweak the colors of the particles then use the Hue Rotate effect. Also the Bloom effect looks great on these video clips since the particles change colors based on their velocity. Wavefunction collapse imminent!

Released May 2026