Particle Background Generator
Make a particle background of snow, embers, dust, bokeh or stars, up to 20,000 particles over a color or your own video. Free, in your browser, as MP4 or GIF.
What is a particle background?
It fills the frame with lots of small moving points, the way snow, sparks or dust drift through a shot. The idea comes from the particle system, a technique first used for the Genesis effect in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) to draw fuzzy things like fire that are hard to build as solid shapes.
Here each particle is drawn on the GPU, up to 20,000 of them. Its position, size and brightness are worked out from the Seed, the particle's own number and the time. Since nothing gets simulated step by step, any given moment of the clip comes out identical on every export.
Which particle styles are there?
There are five. Snow falls with a slight sideways sway. Embers rise, shrink and fade while shifting from your chosen color toward orange-red, and Dust drifts slowly and faintly.
Bokeh draws big see-through discs with a brighter rim, each tinted a little differently, like out-of-focus lights in a photo. Stars stay where they are and twinkle. Embers, Bokeh and Stars get added to the picture as light, while Snow and Dust are painted on top of it.
How to add particles over a photo or video
Load an image or a video, or just start on the blank canvas, then choose a Kind or a preset: Snow, Embers, Dust, Bokeh or Starfield. Count is how many particles there are. Size is how big they are in pixels of a 1080p frame, and Speed is how fast they move.
Colour tints them. With Background at 0 your picture stays visible behind the particles, and as you raise it toward 1 the Background colour covers the picture, which is what the Starfield preset does.
Settings for a holiday snowfall, a campfire and a title over bokeh
Holiday snowfall over a video: Kind Snow, Count 3000, Size 4 and Speed 0.6. At that speed a flake needs 14 to 33 seconds to cross the frame, which feels like a gentle fall. For a blizzard, try Count 12,000, Size 3 and Speed 1.5.
Campfire: put the Embers preset (600 embers, Size 4, #ffc35a) over a dark shot and set Speed to 1.2 so the sparks rise a bit faster. Every ember shrinks and turns redder as it climbs, then fades away.
Title over bokeh: the Bokeh preset (120 discs, Size 22, #ffd9a0) with Background 0.6 and a dark Background colour like #10131c. The picture dims behind the soft lights, and white text reads clearly on top.
Why do embers vanish over a bright sky?
Embers, Bokeh and Stars add their light to whatever is underneath. A pixel that's already white can't get any brighter, so over a bright sky or a white wall they just disappear. They look best on night shots and dark interiors.
Over light footage, either raise Background to dim the picture or switch to Snow or Dust, which cover the picture and don't add light to it. Even then, white snow on a white sky needs a pale gray-blue Colour, like #dfe6ee, before you can see it.
Saving particles as video
GIF struggles with thousands of small moving dots. Every frame gets its own palette and the file balloons, so record MP4 or WebM instead. Each flake falls at its own rate and they never line up again, so set Seamless loop to ½ or 1 second. A crossfade that short gets lost among all those specks.
Light Trails Generator draws glowing ribbons where this one draws points, and the Text Effects hub can turn words into particles.