That is the loveliest boid effect I've ever seen.
Thanks! BTW, it's just prebaked curl noise used to guide the movement of the particles (this is a feature of Unreal Engine's Niagara particle system), so that it can compute so many (hundreds of thousands) in real time. But it gives a decent illusion of flocking behavior ;)
Stylish. And the music is exactly my taste. Seen you offer it for download, but "unfinished, some update over time" repelled me.
Glad you like it -- and sorry about
the "unfinished" notice on my music page, but most of my stuff is just experiments vs. finished albums ready to press ;) If nothing else, I usually leave old significant revisions up alongside any newer revisions that I post. For example, "abyssal4e" is actually a rework of "seaofstone2f14", but the tracks differ enough that I didn't just want to call it "seaofstone (rework)"...
I thought I was looking at the smoke from an explosion at first, then I noticed the boids simulation.
And now I'll forever be a bit disappointed when smoke-elementals and such in fantasy settings are depicted as plain smoke clouds with eyes
This is an entity you encounter deep in an alien sea... I was going for something very different from what we usually classify as familiar life forms. Familiar enough to be recognizable in the way an octopus or deep sea jelly's body can reshape and "flow", and those lights reminiscent of the bioluminescence in nature, but abstract and "wrong" in an unsettling way.
As I noted above, it uses baked curl noise to give the fluid movement appearance, although from what I understand robust real-time flocking computation of particles (where each particle is aware of and responds to neighboring particles and the "flock" as a whole) will be coming in Unreal Engine 5 next year. I think we'll start seeing more and more creative uses of real-time particle effects beyond the stock tried and true archetypes ;)