Noise Field Clefts

A Perlin-noise force field becomes visible through the trails of particles that traverse it, producing a sensuous 3-dimensional effect.

Thousands of particles are scattered across the canvas. At every time step, each particle looks up a Perlin noise value at its current position and treats that value as a direction. Then it takes a short step in that direction. The particle repeats this for a fixed number of steps before expiring. Every step is drawn as a short line segment in a near-black, semi-transparent ink, so the image builds up from thousands of overlapping strokes rather than from any single mark.

In the animated version you get a sense of how it works — but rather than moving all in one go, here the particles are continuously dying and being born anew all over the canvas. And the focus shifts around the noise field on a meandering path, itself generated by the same noise algorithm.