Metaballs are blobs that smoothly blend into each other, creating a soothing aesthetic. This is a tutorial showcasing how to create a subtle metaball-esque background. It illustrates how powerful Cavalry is and how you can achieve pleasing effects only by rigging a few of its built-in behaviors.

Let us create an array of circles. We will achieve this by putting a circle in the Duplicator and randomizing their position. You can promptly do this by pressing on the Alt key and clicking on the circle tool in the toolbar and then the Duplicator icon on the Shelf bar located at the top right. Choose the Random Distribution for the Duplicator to create an array of organically dispersed circles.

Now, we need to spread them apart. Here's a neat move that I discovered while playing around with Cavalry. You can connect the dimensions of the Composition directly into the Duplicator, making it cover the whole canvas with its shape contents.

We will set the colors for the circles. One of the cool featuer of Cavalry is that you can drag and drop colors into shapes and background. You can also generate color palettes with different color schemes (Monochromatic, Analogous, Complementary etc.) on the fly and apply them to objects. We will choose a deep blue color for the background and a bright royal blue as the seed to generate an array of random colors using the Analogous color scheme from the Color Generator.

We will make the circles move along different directions by adding a Noise behaviour to the Duplicator’s Shape Position. We will also add a Noise behaviour to the shape size so that there is variation in the circle sizes as well. Unchecking the Separate Channel inside the Noise Behavior hooked to the Shape Size will ensure that both the x and y values are affected uniformly. Once these two are hooked, we can play with the parameters to get the right kind of behaviour we are looking for. I have tried bringing the Noises’ frequency down to 0.5 so that they move and vary in size a bit slower.

Let us apply the blur filter to the circles so that they blend together with the background. A trick to make the blur scale uniform is to hook the x amount to the y amount. This ensures that they are in sync. Now, scrubbing the x-amount by holding down shift will ensure that they change in increments of 1 unit.

That’s almost it. We will just tone down the opacity of the circles so that they play along nicely with the background and don't draw much attention to them.

There we have it! A nice metaballesque background that can be made in under a minute or so with various ways to parametrize it further and arrive at novel configurations.

Quote that struck me lately

To put it more exactly, let that thing — the contemplative practice — do with you whatever it pleases, and lead you wherever it pleases. Let it do the working, and you be the material it works upon. Just watch it and let it be. Do not interfere with it, as if to help, for fear you should spoil everything. You simply be the wood, and let it—the practice—be the carpenter. You simply be the house, and let it be the master who lives there.

— Anonymous Author

The Cloud of Unknowing (Late 14th century)