Murmuration

The brief

Build a generative particle system that feels alive.

The idea

A murmuration has no leader, and it looks like one mind. Here every bird follows a shared wandering attractor and a curl-noise field, and moving your pointer scatters the flock the way a falcon does.

Decisions

• Dark birds on a dusk gradient: the sky does all the colour.
• Position and velocity live in floating-point textures on the GPU.
• Depth changes bird size, so the flock folds in space.
• The pointer is a predator, which gives you a reason to stay.

How it came together

1. Started with curl noise for organic flow.
2. Added an attractor that wanders, so the flock has somewhere to go.
3. Added the falcon.

How it works

Two floating-point textures hold position and velocity. A fragment shader integrates them, and a vertex shader reads them to place 160,000 points.