Warpfield

Field Style is the first decision, and it decides which half of the panel is live. Marble runs the domain-warped band engine: Warp 1, Warp 2, and Ridge Sharpen shape it and the Palette colors it — flowing veined surfaces for backgrounds, energy plates, and displacement sources. Nebula builds deep-space gas: it keeps Warp 1 and Warp 2, adds Coverage, Voids, Dust, Detail, Knots, and Stars on top of them, lays the whole arrangement out from Seed, and takes its color off the emission wheel Hue Base and Hue Span drive. The dials the other style owns are inert rather than merely subtle: Ridge Sharpen and the Palette do nothing while Field Style is Nebula, and the nine gas dials do nothing while it’s Marble.

Intensity is exposure on the finished field. The default 0.5 sits mid-slider deliberately, so you have headroom in both directions: Intensity 0.2–0.35 for a field that sits behind titles without fighting them, Intensity 0.7–1 when the field is the shot. Master Amount multiplies it, so build the look here and fade it there.

Motion is two dials in one currency. Master Speed runs the field on its own clock. Evolution is animatable phase added to that clock — an angle, where one full turn advances the field exactly as far as one second at Master Speed = 1 does. Set Master Speed = 0 and animate Evolution when the field’s motion has to hit a beat, ease into a hold, or retime with the rest of the shot. Because the two add, you can also leave a slow drift running underneath a keyframed push.

Blend Mode decides how the field leaves the effect. Generate ignores the layer’s pixels entirely and outputs the field over opaque black — the generator case, applied to a solid. Screen and Additive lay it over the layer’s own content as light, which is how you get an energy skin on existing footage without a second layer. Multiply uses the field as density instead, darkening the plate where the field is dark. The three blend modes pass the layer’s own alpha straight through and add no coverage of their own, so the field can never paint into a transparent region — if you need it edge to edge, it goes on a solid. And Intensity = 0 under a blend mode returns the layer untouched, which makes Master Amount = 0 a clean full fade-out.

Field Output is the driver switch. The effect stops emitting a picture and emits the field itself: white RGB with the field value carried in alpha, so a luma matte, an alpha matte, and a displacement map all read the same numbers off one layer. The color path is out of circuit here — Palette, Intensity, and Blend Mode don’t reach it. In Nebula what comes out is the gas density on its own; Stars and Knots stay out of the matte.

Marble’s shape is Warp 1, Warp 2, and Ridge Sharpen. The two warp dials are the two stages of the domain warp, and they don’t do the same job even though they share a range. Warp 1 bends the coordinate that feeds the second stage: raise it and the bands start to curl and pour. Warp 2 bends the coordinate of the final field: raise it on top of that and the curls get folded through each other, which is where the braided, marbled character comes from.

Both dials at 0 isn’t the calm setting — it’s the undirected one. Nothing bends the coordinate at all, so what’s left is plain noise: soft, blobby, no flow in it anywhere. Warp 1 2–4 with Warp 2 4–6 is the working band: enough flow to look alive, enough structure left to read. Sit at the bottom of it when something has to stay legible on top, at the top for an energy surface nobody is meant to read past. Push both past 6 and the field stops being bands at all and becomes turbulence.

Ridge Sharpen is the vein dial. It shapes the band edges: at Ridge Sharpen 0.5–1 the transitions are soft and the field reads as cloud or smoke; at the default 1.5 you get defined bands with visible edges; at Ridge Sharpen 2–3 the edges tighten into hard bright filaments — the cracked-marble, circuit-in-glass, energy-vein look. It’s the fastest way to move between “atmosphere” and “structure” without touching the warp at all.

Set Master Scale before you spend time on any of this. The same warp values look like completely different effects at Master Scale = 2 and Master Scale = 9, so framing first, shaping second — otherwise you dial a balance that stops being the balance the moment the features change size.

Switch Field Style to Nebula and a second set of dials takes over. The frame gets built in passes: a gas body that Coverage, Voids, Dust, and Detail shape, bright Knots sitting inside that gas, and a star field over the top that the gas dims wherever it’s thick.

Coverage is the one to set first: how much of the frame the gas claims. Low Coverage gives isolated clouds in mostly empty space — the wide establishing shot, with room left over for hardware or type. High Coverage fills the frame edge to edge, which reads as being inside the nebula. The default 0.55 is the balanced middle; Coverage 0.3–0.45 is the safest zone for a plate that has to hold graphics on top.

Voids carves the negative space back out. It’s what keeps a high-coverage cloud from turning into fog: the dark channels and holes punched through the gas are what give it depth and make the bright regions read as bright. Raising Coverage and Voids together is usually right — dense gas with structure through it, rather than either a thin cloud or a flat wall.

Dust cuts dark lanes into the gas — the dirty streaks that break up an otherwise even cloud. At Dust = 0 the gas reads clean and graphic, almost illustrative; raise it and the lanes eat into the denser regions and the whole thing turns photographic. Dust 0.5–1.5 covers most astrophotography-style plates.

Detail works at the opposite scale: a fine, high-frequency structure gain on the gas body itself, the filament grain inside the shapes rather than the shapes. Detail 0.5–1.5 for a natural read, higher when the field needs to survive a big scale-up or an aggressive grade. It’s the third dial Master Complexity multiplies, alongside the two warp stages.

Stars brings up the star field threaded through the cloud, and it’s a taste dial with real range: Stars = 0 is a pure gas plate for compositing your own star layer behind, Stars 0.5–1.5 is a believable sky, and past 3 it becomes a dense lattice that reads as a globular cluster rather than a starfield. Knots works at the other end of the process — compact emission cores inside the gas, placed where the material has gathered. Knots 0.5–1 puts a handful of them in the frame, which is what stops a nebula from reading as an even smear; push toward 3 and the cloud becomes mostly knots, closer to a stellar nursery.

The gas and the stars don’t share a frame of reference, and that’s deliberate. Master Scale zooms the gas — larger structures, fewer of them — and it zooms the knots with it, since knots are gas features. The stars stay anchored to the frame at their own three densities, the way stars sit behind a cloud rather than inside it. The gas also drifts and evolves on the clock while the stars hold their positions and twinkle where they are, which is what keeps a slow plate from reading as one sliding texture.

Seed re-rolls that entire layout — where the gas gathers, where the voids fall, which cells carry knots and stars — without touching a shape dial. When the structure is right but the composition lands badly (a dense region straight through your title’s safe area, a void where you needed material), scrub Seed rather than re-dialing the look. The slider tops out at 100 while the hard range runs to 9999, so there is far more variation available than the UI suggests, and it’s deterministic: one seed on one frame resolves to one arrangement, whichever machine renders it. Like the rest of this panel it’s a Nebula dial — a Marble field ignores it.

Color is the last stage, which makes it the safest thing to change late — but Marble and Nebula source it from completely separate machinery, so check Field Style before you reach in here.

In Marble, Palette picks one of twelve stored ramps that the field’s value maps through: Ion Drift is the default, Graphite is the neutral grayscale one, and the rest are characterized individually in the palettes list. Because the structure is computed before the color, auditioning ramps costs you nothing structurally — the veins, folds, and voids stay exactly where they are while the whole look changes temperature.

The popup’s first entry is the one that matters when the field has to land on a specific color. Custom starts from the same base ramp Ion Drift ships and leaves Hue Shift live on top of it, rotating that ramp’s colors; a full 360° turn is one lap back to where you started. The twelve factory entries below it pin Hue Shift to zero instead — they ship the color they ship. So the route to “this shape, but in our brand color” runs through Custom, not through a factory ramp plus a rotation.

One thing to know about Marble motion: the palette lookup advances with the clock as well as with the field, so part of what reads as movement in a colored plate is the ramp traveling through structure that has barely moved. It’s why the same field feels quieter going out through Field Output, which has no color path at all.

In Nebula there is no palette to own the dial, so Hue Shift stays live and folds into Hue Base. That makes it the animation handle for a gas plate that should drift through color over a long shot: a few degrees per second turns the cloud without ever looking like a hue-rotate filter, because the structure is moving too.

Hue Base and Hue Span are the gas’s own emission color. Hue Base is the center hue the cloud sits on; Hue Span is how far the hue travels across the cloud’s structure. Keep Hue Span 0.1–0.25 for a monochromatic, single-emission-line read — one gas, one color, the most photographic option. The default 0.35 separates the dense material from the thin material by hue, not just by brightness. Push Hue Span 0.6–1 and the cloud spans most of the wheel, which is the poster-art read: dramatic, saturated, not remotely astronomical, and often exactly right for a title background.

Read this group carefully, because it breaks the suite’s pattern. Two of these dials are percentages and two are not.

Master Amount and Master Complexity behave the way Master dials do everywhere else: percent, 100 neutral. Master Amount multiplies Intensity — one slider to fade the whole field up or down without disturbing the balance you dialed. Master Complexity multiplies Warp 1, Warp 2, and Detail at once. In Marble that lands on the two warp stages (Detail is a Nebula dial and has nothing to bite on there), so it’s the fold-and-braid slider; in Nebula it rides the gas warp and the gas’s fine grain together. Master Complexity = 60 calms the whole field down, 150 adds folding and filament — the fastest way to retune how busy a look is without re-dialing three sliders.

Master Scale and Master Speed are not percentages. They are the field’s own scale and speed dials, adopted into this group with their native ranges. Master Scale is a frequency: field cycles across the frame height, not a percentage of anything. Double it and twice as much structure lays down the frame; the useful working span is Master Scale 1–10, low for a few enormous sweeping features, high for dense fine texture. Both axes divide by the frame height, so features stay square in a wide comp instead of stretching with the aspect ratio. Master Speed = 0.4 is a slow, ambient drift — the default because that’s what a background usually wants. Master Speed 0.05–0.2 is barely-moving atmosphere, Master Speed 1–3 is active churning energy, and Master Speed = 0 stops the clock: the hand-keyframed Evolution case.

The usual Master rule still applies to the two percent dials: ride Master Amount or Intensity, not both at once, or the scaling doubles up.