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Tunnels effect

Spiral Bloom

Spiral Bloom is a tunnel and feedback effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Soft repeated spiral echoes blooming from the center.

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 Spiral Bloom free All effects

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

The eye-in-triangle ringed with rainbow bands of green, red and violet, soft doubled edges around the triangle — Spiral Bloom, default settings

What Spiral Bloom does

Stacks five faint copies of the picture, each scaled up a little from the centre and turned a little further round, then washes the lot with rainbow rings that ripple outward. The copies keep rotating, so edges smear into soft spiral ghosts. Echo sets the scale step between copies, Twist spaces them round the turn, and Bloom sets how hard the ringed tint covers the source.

Using Spiral Bloom

Where it works: Cover art that needs a psychedelic halo without losing the subject, because the original stays under the echoes. It also suits a gentle build where Bloom climbs toward the drop.
With the music: Rotation comes from the clock, not the music. A beat-triggered Envelope on Bloom floods the rings over the picture on each hit and lets them drain, and B5 (mids) on Twist fans the echoes wider through busy passages.
Starting point: Echo centre, Twist a quarter, Bloom centre, Tint hard left, then sweep Tint until the ring colours sit with your art's palette.

Controls

Echo: Spiral echo radius falloff.
Twist: Angular offset between echoes.
Bloom: Final bloom and tint mix strength.
Tint: Rotates the bloom colour around the wheel.
Wind: Which way the echoes spiral out of the centre.
Speed: Rate of the effect motion. Centre is the authored speed, hard left a tenth of it.

Pairs well with Spiral Bloom