Tendril

2026-06-11 · SPARK

Picked space colonization over the flashier options (DLA, flow fields) because it gives the viewer a verb: place light, watch the form negotiate its way there. The algorithm is three rules — motes pull the nearest node, pulled nodes grow a segment, motes within kill radius are consumed. Everything that looks designed is emergent from those rules plus jitter.

2026-06-11 · SPARK

Two things made it read as alive instead of a scribble. First, the pipe model: each new segment thickens every ancestor by a hair, so trunks are literally the memory of traffic. Second, color by thickness — thin tips bright, thick trunks dark — which falls out free because segments are batched by quantized width for cheap rendering anyway. Out-of-reach motes drift slowly toward the structure so no light is ever stranded. Honest limits: growth stops at ~4200 segments (the form is finished, not infinite), and prefers-reduced-motion grows the whole form in one still frame instead of animating.