Skip to content

Liquid effect

Metaball Lava

Metaball Lava is a liquid video effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Floating metaballs melt the image where their fields overlap.

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 Metaball Lava 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 with small purple and green blobs at the triangle's apex and on both sides — Metaball Lava, default settings

What Metaball Lava does

Six blobs orbit the frame on looping paths, and where their fields overlap past a threshold the picture inside is bent toward them and recoloured with a channel-swapped lava tint. Everywhere else stays untouched. Tight sets how large the blobs grow, Pull how hard they warp the image around them, and Lava how strong the hot tint gets.

Using Metaball Lava

Where it works: Retro lava-lamp moments, lounge sets and slow chill-out visuals, because the blobs drift on their own and leave most of the frame alone. Raise Tight for merging, lamp-sized blobs on a cover.
With the music: Tight is the blob size, so B1 (kick) there makes every blob swell on the kick and shrink between. A slow LFO on Lava fades the hot tint in and out across a phrase.
Starting point: Tight three-quarters, Pull centre, Lava centre, then raise Tight until neighbouring blobs start merging into one.

Controls

Tight: Metaball field falloff / blob sharpness.
Pull: UV warp strength from metaball gradients.
Lava: Spectrum lava tint vs sampled color.
Speed: Rate of the effect motion. Centre is the authored speed, hard left a tenth of it.

Pairs well with Metaball Lava