The Particle Vortex Mode: Five Arms Lit by the Core

The catalogue says Particle Vortex is where particles ride five spiral arms down the tube toward you, brightest near the light at the far end; each kick throws a fifth of them outward. It flies the same lit corridor as the rest of the Tunnel engine, with the rings turned down to about a third of their light, and draws a vortex of particles over it.

Five arms, close to the walls

Each particle rides one of five spiral arms, a little off its arm's line, between about two fifths of the way out and the wall of the tube. An arm twists by about half a turn from the camera to the far end and the whole vortex turns slowly, so the arms read as spirals running into the distance rather than as a cloud.

The particles travel toward you with the corridor and spend more of each trip near the camera, where perspective spreads them out, so the arms fill the frame instead of crowding the vanishing point. The count comes from the shared quality budget with a ceiling of 700. The number you set is a target, not a promise. It is scaled by the preview scale, by the canvas area relative to 1080p, and by a further reduction on machines reporting four or fewer cores, then capped. Export with capture quality on and the last two of those are switched off, so the exported frame is the count you asked for.

Lit by the core

A particle's brightness is how much of the core light reaches its depth, the band at its angle (bass along the floor, treble overhead) and the track's loudness, so the particles near the far end glow and the near ones are soft points of colour. On each kick one fifth of them, a different fifth each beat, is thrown outward and flares, and the core light and the corridor's shockwave flare with it.

Particles you can shape

Geometry is scoped to this mode alone in the engine, because it is the only one that stamps particles rather than drawing bands of light. The shared stamping routine understands squares, rounded rectangles, triangles, stars, ellipses, short line segments and a soft radial glow as well as the default circle, so the same spiral can read as sparks, as confetti or as a smear of light.

The corridor behind the vortex follows Cross section, which this mode ships as circle: round, square or hexagonal.

When to reach for it

Bass-led electronic music, psytrance, ambient and anything that wants a hypnotic pull toward the centre. It reads well at 9:16, because the spiral holds the middle of the frame. For the structural opposite, read The Corridor Grid Mode: Walls Made of the Spectrum; for the engine's speed-first mode, The Warp Field Mode.

Open Particle Vortex in the gallery or go to the editor.