The Warp Field Mode: Streaks You Can Read as Speed

Warp Field is the speed mode of the Tunnel engine: streaks of light race past along the walls of a dim corridor, each lit by its own band; the kick flares the newest ones at the far end. It flies the same lit ring corridor as the engine's other five modes, with the rings turned down to about a third of their light, and draws its streaks over it.

A ring cannot show velocity, a streak can

A ring travelling toward you is the same shape on every frame; only its size changes, and the eye reads that as scale rather than as speed. A streak is a short stretch of the path a point takes, so its length IS its speed. Each one rides its own lane close to the wall at its own pace, between about one and three times the corridor's, and stretches as it nears the camera, which is where perspective makes it fastest on screen.

Each streak reads the band it flies through

A streak's brightness is the level of the band at its angle, mapped the way the corridor's rings map it: bass along the floor, treble overhead, mirrored left and right. A bass-heavy passage lights the streaks under you and a hi-hat passage lights the ones above. Fog fades the far streaks into the core light's haze, and the whole field burns brighter as the track gets louder.

The beat lands at the core

On each kick the streaks nearest the far end flare, the core light flares with them, and a shockwave leaves the core and lights the corridor rings it passes. All of it happens in the inner part of the frame and fades before it reaches the edges, so the beat reads as an event at the heart of the tunnel rather than the whole frame flashing. A flash limiter holds full-strength shockwaves to three a second whatever the tempo.

The flight itself never lurches. Travel is the integral of Speed, smoothed over about a second and a half, so even a Speed bound to the bass swells with the music's sections instead of jerking on every kick.

Controls

• Speed sets how fast everything travels, and this mode ships it at 0.38, the fastest in the engine.
• Depth and Field of view shape the corridor the streaks are projected through: how far you can see down it, and how wide its walls open.
• Fog sets how quickly the far streaks fade into the haze.
• Camera sway swings the far end of the corridor against the near rings as the camera drifts, and Bank on sections tilts the camera into each new section of the song.
• Core light sets the light at the vanishing point, and Kick shockwave how brightly each kick's wave lights the rings.

When to reach for it

Hard dance, trance, drum and bass, trailers, and any drop that wants the frame to move. The streak count comes from the shared quality budget, which scales it to the device, and the corridor behind is drawn by the GPU where the browser allows, so check the preview on a phone before committing to a long export.

Open Warp Field or the editor. For the mode in the same engine whose rings are cut from the waveform, read The Waveform Tube Mode: Rings Cut From the Waveform.