Flocking simulation created with BOIDS, showing dozens of triangular agents moving in coordinated swarms across a dark canvas, their colors shifting based on speed.
No one is in charge. That's the whole point.
BOIDS, built by Kyiv-based designer Anatolii Babii, is a parametric playground for flocking behavior. Each agent in the simulation follows three rules: steer away from neighbors that get too close, match the heading of nearby agents, and move toward the group's center of mass. There's no central controller. Every boid only sees what's within its vision radius and runs the math locally. What emerges looks coordinated, almost intelligent, but it's just vectors and thresholds doing their work frame by frame.
The tool exposes everything. Alignment force, cohesion strength, separation intensity, steering limits, velocity drag, noise angle. You can tune how many neighbors each boid considers, how far it can see, how sharply it can turn. The interface lets you click to attract the flock or right-click to scatter it. Shapes can be circles, squares, triangles, or a mix. Colors shift based on speed, turning rate, or randomness. You can drop in custom textures for the background or apply them directly to the boid shapes. Presets are included to demonstrate different behaviors, and you can save your own parameter combinations to reload later.
Babii's broader catalog includes over a dozen browser-based generative tools, each one exploring a different procedural technique. The tools themselves feel less like products and more like invitations to experiment.
- Live Demo: https://antlii.work/BOIDS-Tool
- Author: Anatolii Babii (LinkedIn, Instagram, Behance)