Ebru marbling — incompressibility you can see

Turkish paper-marbling floats ink on a still bath and rakes it into swirls. Here the bath is a Helix Noise field: each frame the pigment is carried along it by semi-Lagrangian advection. Because the flow is divergence-free, the ink is only ever rearranged — bands stretch and fold but never tear open or pile up. That is the defining property of an incompressible flow, made directly visible. Swirl is the field's coherence; click or drag to drop pigment, pick a colour below.

helix-noise · semi-Lagrangian advection · div-free
ink
drag on the paper to pour ink · the flow does the marbling