Point Cloud Displacement
The Point Cloud Displacement card in the 3D track inspector controls how point cloud particles — and Gaussian splats — move each frame. Each sub-system has its own toggle, and several can run at once.
The modes
Section titled “The modes”| Mode | UI label | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Noise | NOISE | Simplex noise field applied to every particle’s rest position. Instant, zero-setup, organic. |
| Audio | AUDIO | The live audio spectrum moves the cloud, and drum hits send ripples through it. |
| Fluid Simulation | FLUID DISPLACEMENT | GPU Navier-Stokes velocity field driven by force generators. Flowing, turbulent, physics-based. |
| Particle Sim | PARTICLE SIM | Spring-mass system. Each particle springs back to rest while forces scatter it away. Elastic, bouncy. |
| Directional Flow | DIRECTIONAL FLOW | Continuous drift along an axis with wrap-around — an endless conveyor of points. Great for fly-through motion. |
| Track Displacement | TRACK DISPLACEMENT | A Layer track’s texture is decoded frame-by-frame — RGB channels map to XYZ offsets. Shape-driven, scriptable. |
Choosing a mode
Section titled “Choosing a mode”| You want… | Use |
|---|---|
| Quick organic motion with no setup | Noise |
| The cloud moving with the music | Audio |
| Flowing, self-interacting fluid dynamics | Fluid Simulation |
| Elastic, bouncy particle response to forces | Particle Sim |
| Motion driven by a specific ISF shader or visual | Track Displacement |
| Endless travel through a scene (road, tunnel, landscape) | Directional Flow |
Modes are not mutually exclusive — you can combine Noise and Audio with any of the simulation modes for layered results.
How the modes combine
Section titled “How the modes combine”Noise stacks with everything. It offsets each particle’s rest position before any simulation runs. Enable NOISE alongside Fluid, Particle Sim, or Track Displacement to add organic variation on top of structured motion.
Particle Sim overrides Fluid and Track Displacement. When PARTICLE SIM is enabled, the FLUID DISPLACEMENT and TRACK DISPLACEMENT sections show “Inactive — Particle Sim owns position”. Particle Sim takes exclusive control of position integration; the other two are bypassed until it is turned off.
Applies simplex noise directly to every particle’s rest position each frame. There is no simulation state, no warm-up time, and no force generators — just a smooth animated field that runs immediately.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| Amplitude | How far particles are displaced from their rest position |
| Scale | Spatial frequency of the noise field — lower = larger blobs, higher = finer detail |
| Speed | How fast the noise field animates over time |
| Seed | Shifts the noise pattern — useful when running multiple 3D tracks side by side |
| Octaves | Layers of noise detail: 1 (smooth) to 4 (rough) |
| Kaleido | Folds the noise field into radial symmetry, up to 16-fold at 1. 0 is off |
| Drip | Adds a looping downward sag: regions of the cloud fall away, then float back up. The plain noise only wobbles points around their rest position; Drip makes them travel. 0 is off |
| Drip Rate | Drip cycles per second, up to 2 |
| Drip Hold | Share of each cycle spent falling. High gives a long slow sag and a quick recovery; low gives a quick drop and a lazy recovery |
| Drip Spread | 0 makes whole regions sag together; 1 gives every point its own clock |
| Structure | Reshapes how the noise moves the cloud — see below. Off adds the noise as a plain offset |
| Structure Amount | Strength of the selected Structure mode. Shown once a mode is picked |
| Accumulate | Each frame’s noise builds on the last, so the cloud is carried through the field into long twisting ribbons |
| Pull Back | How strongly accumulated noise is drawn back toward the original shape each frame. 0 lets it drift forever; higher keeps the ribbons tied to the cloud. Shown while Accumulate is on |
| Reset Accumulation | Snaps the cloud back to its original shape and starts building again. Mappable, so MIDI, audio or an LFO can fire it |
Drip Rate, Drip Hold and Drip Spread only appear once Drip is above 0 (or mapped). The cycle runs back and forth, so it loops without a visible reset, and it works with the Particle Sim.
Accumulate
Section titled “Accumulate”Normally the noise is worked out fresh from each particle’s rest position every frame, so the cloud wobbles in place. With Accumulate on, the noise is applied to wherever each particle ended up last frame. The cloud gets pushed further through the noise field every frame and stretches into long, twisting ribbons.
Only the noise builds up. Twist and Bend, Audio, Directional Flow and the Particle Sim all stay live on top of it. It doesn’t need the Particle Sim, and it also works on files that are moving or mid-transition. It works on every point cloud input — files, splats, texture, solid, text, audio and draw trail. Anything that changes the number of points starts the build-up again: switching to a file with a different point count, or changing the grid size or downsample of a texture, solid or text cloud.
In 3.2.2 and earlier this look only appeared by accident, with the Particle Sim on (often at Displacement Strength 0). Projects saved that way with a PLY file or Gaussian splat open with Accumulate already on, so they look the same.
Structure modes
Section titled “Structure modes”Instead of simply pushing points along the noise, a Structure mode combines the noise with each point’s position to build a texture.
| Mode | Character |
|---|---|
| Fiber | Combs the cloud into thread- and hair-like strands |
| Swirl | Pushes points sideways around the centre, keeping the cloud’s outline |
| Banded | Reflects points across the noise, folding the cloud into layered bands |
| Soft | A gentle drift halfway towards the noise field |
| Twist | A coherent swirl that winds the cloud around the Z axis, with the noise varying how tightly each part winds |
| Magnet | Barely moves the outside of the cloud but pulls hard towards the centre and the axis planes |
| Tunnel | Reads the noise around the Z axis: walls push in and out, corkscrew around the axis, and slide along it. Built for a cloud that surrounds the camera and flows down Z |
Noise is the lightest option. It has no GPU simulation cost beyond the per-particle offset and is a good first step before adding a heavier simulation mode.
Moves the cloud with the project’s audio input. The spectrum is split into 64 bands, each with its own envelope; every point picks a band and is pushed by it. Drum hits can also send expanding shockwaves through the cloud. Like Noise, Audio is added on top of the rest positions, so it stacks with the other modes.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| Amount | Strength of the spectrum displacement |
| Mapping | How frequencies are laid out across the cloud — see below |
| Flip | Reverses the frequency layout, so highs sit where the bass was |
| Tilt | Balances bass against treble. Above the centre boosts the highs so hi-hats read visually |
| Attack | How quickly a band responds to a rise, 1–100 ms |
| Release | How long a band takes to fall back, 20 ms–2 s — the length of the visual smear |
| Ripple Amount | Strength of the shockwaves fired by drum hits. 0 is off |
| Ripple Speed | How fast each shockwave expands |
| Ripple Width | Thickness of the shockwave shell |
| Ripple Decay | How quickly a shockwave fades |
| Ripple Source | Which drum detector fires ripples: Kick, Snare, Hihat or All |
The ripple controls below Ripple Amount only appear once it is above 0 (or mapped).
Mapping
Section titled “Mapping”| Mapping | Description |
|---|---|
| Radial | Bass at the core, highs at the rim. Points push outwards |
| Height | An EQ landscape: bass at the bottom, highs at the top. Points rise along Y |
| Angle | The spectrum wraps around the vertical axis |
| Noise | Bands are scattered across the cloud in organic patches. Warp Scale sets the patch size |
| Spectral | Each octave drives its own noise field, sized to match: bass makes large slow swells, highs make fine shimmer. Extra controls: Scale, Drift, Sharpness (concentrates motion into sparse hot patches) and Coverage (below it, nothing moves, so hits tear off separate chunks) |
| Spectrogram | A scrolling waterfall: X is frequency, Z is the last second of history, and points lift along Y by the exact level |
| Waveform | An oscilloscope: X is a moment in the last ~85 ms of audio, and the raw samples move the points — left channel along Y, right along Z. Extra control: Window |
| Glitch | Splits space into blocks, big ones for bass octaves and tiny ones for the top octaves. Each block always answers to the same band, so the same sound throws the same blocks. Extra controls: Detail (bass block size), Drift (slides the block grid through the cloud), Steps and Threshold |
| Spectral Glitch | A hybrid: Spectral’s drifting fields, applied block by block, so coherent chunks tear off in organic directions. Extra controls: Detail, Drift, Sharpness and Coverage |
In Glitch and Spectral Glitch, the stereo balance suppresses blocks on the side opposite the sound.
Directional Flow
Section titled “Directional Flow”Moves every particle along a direction vector and wraps it back within a bounded range when it crosses the boundary — like an infinite conveyor. Stand a camera inside a Gaussian splat of a road, point the flow along Z, and the scene travels past you forever: points that fall off the far end re-enter from the other side.
It works on both point clouds and Gaussian splats. If a scanned scene isn’t aligned with the axis you want to travel along, use the Rotate X/Y/Z sliders in the splat’s PLACEMENT section — unlike the node TRANSFORM rotation, placement rotation reorients the content while the flow direction stays fixed, so you can line a road or tunnel up with the travel axis.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| Speed | Continuous drift speed in world units per second. Negative reverses direction. |
| Offset | Manual phase shift through the wrap cycle. A full 0→1 sweep travels exactly one repeat period, so driving it with a sawtooth LFO scrolls the scene seamlessly — and lets you sync travel to tempo instead of free-running Speed. |
| Dir X / Y / Z | The flow direction vector. Default is +Z (toward the camera). |
| Crop | On (default): content outside the bounding box is hidden, and the box slice along the flow axis becomes the repeating window — set Bound Z to 0.25 with flow on Z and only that quarter slice cycles, while the rest of the cloud stays invisible. Off (legacy): the entire cloud is folded into the Range window instead. |
| Bound X / Y / Z | Crop box size per axis as a fraction of the cloud’s own measured per-axis bounds, centered on the cloud — so 1 spans the full scene on that axis whatever its shape or file scale. The measurement is floater-trimmed (5th–95th percentile), and the sliders reach up to 2× to extend past it. Shown when Crop is on. |
| Range | Length of the wrap window along the flow axis, in world units. Shown when Crop is off; with Crop on, the box defines the window. |
| Scatter | Per-particle phase spread. 0 moves the cloud as one rigid slab; 1 spreads particles uniformly across the window so the wrap becomes a continuous stream. |
| Edge Fade | Dissolves particles out before they hit the wrap boundary and back in on re-entry, hiding the jump. |
| Mirror | Mirrored repeat: content still travels in one direction, but what re-enters at the far boundary is the reflected copy of the window content — like a mirrored-repeat texture wrap — so entry is seamless with no content jump. Content that is momentarily off-window hides until its turn comes back around. Because each point exists only once, content that should appear twice (straddling a mirror fold) thins out on the exit side; Edge Fade softens this. |
With Crop on, the box is anchored in the world, and the Origin X/Y/Z sliders in the PLACEMENT section slide the cloud through it — so a small box becomes a window you can aim at any part of the scene, and only what’s inside it cycles. The node TRANSFORM position moves the box itself, taking the whole tunnel with it. (With Crop off there is no box, and both simply move the cloud.)
Directional Flow stacks with the other modes — with the Particle Sim active it drives each particle’s rest target, so the springs carry the cloud along instead of fighting it.