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Liquid effect

Coral Growth

Coral Growth is a liquid video effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Grows coral that creeps along the picture instead of across it — it branches where the frame is bright and starves where it is dark.

Runs live on video, images, a camera or generated art. Stack it with any other effect, and route LFOs, envelopes or any of ten audio bands to its controls so it moves with the music.

Try Coral Growth free All effects

The untouched demo art: an eye inside a triangle over wavy teal, blue and peach lines — Source

The eye-in-triangle illustration covered with scattered bright yellow spots where the coral colony is starting — Coral Growth, default settings

What Coral Growth does

Grows a branching Gray-Scott colony fed by the picture's brightness: lit ground gets colonised and dark ground starves, so the coral traces the image rather than covering it evenly. The colony creeps slowly, lit like a raised surface, with growing tips brighter than the calcified tissue behind. Terrain sets how much the picture steers it, Relief the lighting, Tint and Blend the colour.

Using Coral Growth

Where it works: Slow organic builds, ambient sets and long-form loops where the frame should change over minutes rather than bars. Bright subjects on dark ground give it the most to follow, because the coral grows along the light.
With the music: Terrain suits a slow source: a free-running LFO on it swings the colony between ignoring the frame and clinging to its highlights. B6 (upper mids) on Relief lets leads catch the light on the branch faces.
Starting point: Feed centre, Kill centre, Scale a quarter, Terrain three-quarters, Relief centre, Blend three-quarters, then give it thirty seconds to branch.

Controls

Feed: Base rate of fresh substrate, before the picture has its say.
Kill: How fast growth is taken back. Around centre this branches; below it the branches thicken into lobes and above they thin out and snap.
Scale: Thickness of one branch, and with it how fast the colony covers the frame.
Terrain: How much the picture decides where food is. At zero the colony ignores the frame; up high it will only grow into the lit parts and treats the shadows as rock.
Relief: Lighting across the branch faces. Turns a flat map into something with thickness.
Tint: Colour of the living tissue.
Blend: Weight of the colony over the picture underneath.
Key light: Which corner the light on the colony comes from.

Pairs well with Coral Growth