100 Million Particle Ball Dropped in 4k60fps
Timestamps
Timestamps
00:00 Bowl
00:30 Double Wedge
01:01 Funnel Trio
01:40 Gaussian Bump
02:02 Water Slide
02:32 Sine Waves
02:49 Wedge 88° 2 Balls
03:40 Shark Teeth
100 million particle rainbow balls dropped into eight different structures, back to back. Same number of particles, same physics, only the geometry changes between segments.
This is a follow up of our previous video where we dropped a 1 million ball on a wedge at different degrees ( • 1 million particle ball dropped in 4k60fps )
The balls start out hex-packed as a solid mass. Once released they're purely ballistic: no ball-on-ball collisions, only wall bounces and gravity. What looks like a fluid is actually 100 million independent trajectories interacting only with the environment around them. The resulting patterns can be surprisingly structured: standing waves, particle jets, chaotic splashes, symmetry breaking, and slow settling effects that emerge purely from geometry.
A huge inspiration for this project was Alexander Gustafsson's channel ( / @animations_ag , especially his large-scale particle simulations that showed just how mesmerizing simple physics can become at extreme particle counts.
This video was rendered in native 4K at 60 FPS. For this project I completely rewrote the simulation pipeline to leverage the GPU instead of the CPU, utilizing all 40 GPU cores of an Apple M4 Max. The jump from 1 million to 100 million particles required a fundamentally different approach to computation and rendering.
Across all eight simulations, the clips took roughly 24 hours of total compute time to generate.
Software used:
• Custom GPU-accelerated particle simulator
• Python
• Metal (Apple GPU acceleration)
• FFmpeg for encoding
#simulation #particles #physics #gpu #apple #m4max #4k #satisfying