SUPERNOVA Manual

What the particles are made of.

Drag a single image, a folder of images (a timed photo sequence), or a video file onto the window. The particles sample its colour; a video plays and re-samples live.

High-contrast subjects on a plain background cut out best (see Cutout). A slow video loop makes an endless evolving backdrop.

The 50 curated worlds — the factory presets.

Each world is a whole scene: it swaps the physics (how particles move), the geometry and the colour look in one click. Browse the grid and step next / previous.

Treat a world as a starting point — pick the closest one, then push INTENSITY and the four domains until it's yours. Five of them — Satellite, Parallax, Lantern, Meridian and Vantage — share one idea: your picture stays your picture. They add depth, parallax, a slow orbit, a cut-out or a light, but they never mirror it or break it apart. Reach for those when the image itself is the point.

The master "life" of the whole field.

0–100 %. Scales how hard the entire system reacts to the audio — from a calm shimmer to a full storm. The single most important knob.

Automate it (or MIDI-learn it to a fader / mod wheel) to make the visual build and drop with the track.

Your whole session, in order, under the picture.

As soon as media is loaded a strip of numbered thumbnails appears between the visual and the knobs — every photo and video of the session, the current one outlined with a small bar counting down to the next change. Click a tile to cue it (← / → step through it, and the number keys 1–9 / 0 jump straight to one), drag to reorder, ✕ to remove. Dropping files or a folder onto the strip inserts them where you drop them; ▦ in the top bar hides it.

Removing, reordering, rotating and clearing are all undoable with Cmd + Z — and the session is saved with the project and with your user presets, so reopening brings it back.

The shape of the canvas, like a project format.

AUTO follows your first item — a vertical photo gives 9:16, a square 1:1, a landscape 16:9 — or pick FREE / 16:9 / 9:16 / 1:1 / 4:5 / 4:3. The same menu chooses FIT (the whole image, letterboxed) or FILL (cropped to fill). The editor, fullscreen output, the Syphon feed and the EXPORT default all follow it.

Shooting for Reels? Set 9:16 first — EXPORT then lists Vertical at the top, marked canvas.

How the sequence moves on.

Seconds (the classic slideshow), Beats — 1 · 2 · 4 · 8 · 16 · 32 · 64, cuts landing on the bar — or Kick: a new photo on every kick the analysis hears, never faster than a minimum gap (0.25–8 s). Order is Loop or Shuffle; the transition is Cut or Burst, where the old photo explodes and re-forms as the new one.

In Beats a cue waits for the next bar — the armed tile shows a dashed outline — so the cut lands on the beat. Hold Shift to cut right now.

A file that moved is marked, not dropped.

If a photo or video isn't where it was, its tile stays in the session marked missing: a red ! instead of the thumbnail, the name greyed out. Nothing cuts to it — the sequence, ← / →, the number keys and the MIDI cues all step over it. Right-click for Relink… (that one file) or Relink folder…, which finds every missing item that used to live beside it in one go.

If the file simply comes back to where it was, the tile heals itself the next time the session refreshes.

How the particles move — the first of the four domains.

Motion picks the flow field (Contours · Matter · Wave · Vortices · Radial); Chaos, Curl Scale, Home Pull, Gravity and Momentum shape the forces; Speed time-warps the whole simulation (50 % = ×1).

Vortices + a little Chaos gives a galactic swirl; Radial + Home Pull snaps the image back together between hits.

The kick response — a radial shove on every onset.

0–100 %. When an onset is detected the particles are pushed outward, then the field re-forms. This is the "explode on the kick" behaviour.

Pair a high Blast with Home Pull so it detonates and re-gathers cleanly on every beat.

Slow RMS breathing and a visual sidechain.

Breathe swells the whole field with the loudness envelope; Pump ducks it on transients like a sidechained compressor (≈30 % is the classic feel).

A touch of Pump locked to the kick gives that pumping, club-visual throb without any MIDI.

What each particle looks like — the second domain.

Size and Glow set the grain and bloom; Density draws more or fewer of the 262k; Scatter morphs from a crisp image to a loose cloud; Shimmer adds sparkle.

Low Density with big Size reads as chunky embers; high Density with small Size reads as fine dust.

The sprite each particle is drawn with.

Choose from Dot · Disc · Ring · Dash · Tri · Quad · Spark — SDF glyphs rendered crisp at any size.

Dash + Trails gives calligraphic streaks; Ring reads as bokeh; Spark reads as fireworks.

Velocity streaks behind each particle.

0–100 %. Feeds a fraction of the previous frame back, so fast particles smear into light-paths.

High Trails with low Density turns motion into flowing ribbons of light.

GPU nearest-neighbour connections.

0–100 %. Draws lines between particles that are close together — a live constellation / network mesh that reacts as the field moves.

Keep it subtle on dense fields; on a sparse field it becomes a clear plexus web.

Isolate the subject from its background — as a live knob.

0–100 %. Uses Vision saliency + subject cutout to blend between the full image and a mask of the subject only, so the background falls away and the subject floats — a 3D cutout you can rotate in particle-space.

Best on a photo with a clean, flat background; combine with Depth to sculpt and spin the subject in space.

The viewpoint on the field — the third domain.

Depth lifts the field into real 3D volume (order-independent additive, no z-sort); Rot X / Rot Y tilt it; Rotate and Orbit spin the view automatically; Kaleido mirrors it into 2/4/6/8 segments.

A slow Orbit with some Depth gives a hands-off, always-moving 3D sculpture — perfect for a stream.

Morph the image into a geometric body.

Figure picks a target shape — Image · Sphere · Spiral · Rings · Grid · Helix — and Form fades from the flat image (0 %) to that 3D geometry (100 %).

Ride Form up on a drop so the picture collapses into a spinning sphere or helix, then back.

The look ramp (Palette) and how it's applied — the fourth domain.

Palette selects one of 17 curated looks baked in OKLab (Thermal, Magma, Vaporwave, Black Gold…); Color Amount mixes the gradient-map in; Background sets the look's paper.

Palette 0 (Original) keeps your image's own colours; the curated ramps re-grade the whole scene by luminance.

Global colour trims.

Saturation 0–100 % (50 = neutral); Hue rotates the whole palette; Hue Cycle drifts the hue slowly over time.

A gentle Hue Cycle keeps a long stream visually evolving without touching anything.

Curated, seeded randomisation.

A master Variation plus per-domain Movement / Matter / Camera / Color Var nudge a world into a fresh but still-musical variant — deterministic from the preset's seed.

Turn Variation up a touch to make a familiar world feel new, without going off the rails.

One card per LFO, four in all. Open the panel with the LFO button.

ON enables the slot and the target starts moving. TARGET picks one of 12 parameters — hue, saturation, intensity, size, glow, chaos, rotate, orbit, scatter, trails, links, depth. RATE under SYNC offers every division from a sixteenth to four bars, each with its triplet (·T) and dotted (·D) — 21 in all; under FREE it becomes Hz (0.05–20) and runs off the clock instead of the tempo, so it keeps moving with the transport stopped or with no host. SHAPE is a strip of 6 icons that draw their own curve: Sine, Triangle, Saw, Square, Ramp Down and Sample & Hold.

At 100 % DEPTH an LFO sweeps exactly the target's range and is clamped to it — several LFOs on the same parameter can no longer push it out of bounds.

The second line of the card: how it swings.

BI swings both ways around where you left the knob; UNI only adds, from the knob upward. PHASE offsets where the cycle starts, 0–360° — set two LFOs apart and they chase each other instead of pulsing together. RETRIG restarts the cycle now, on the current beat, without moving your PHASE setting. All three are saved with the project.

RETRIG is how you line an LFO up with a drop by hand — and the starting point when there is no host transport to lock to.

What each modulator is doing, right now.

Every card carries a meter that pulses with the LFO's value in real time. Synced LFOs follow the BeatClock — the host tempo inside a DAW, the TAP button in the app — and either way the modulation is recalculated on every rendered frame, at your display's refresh rate.

That per-frame recalculation is why a fast LFO reads as a wave and not a staircase. Watch the meter to time a peak to the drop.

Save, recall and undo your own looks.

Store the full state as a user preset (save / recall) and switch between scenes on the fly. Every move is undoable — full Undo / Redo — so you can push a world hard and step back.

Build a few scenes for a set and jump between them live; nudge Variation inside a scene to keep it fresh without losing the look.

Play and automate the visuals from a controller.

Right-click any knob to MIDI-learn it, then drive it from a CC. Incoming notes fire events — a note detonates the field (Explode) or launches a directional ray whose angle follows the pitch. Works in the plugin (needs MIDI input) and the app. Notes 72–87 cue tiles 1–16 of the media session, 88 / 89 step next / previous and 90 jumps to a random photo (never the one on screen) — so the session stays playable in immersive or fullscreen, where the strip isn't visible. Cues follow the sequence clock; MIDI cue: now in the SEQ menu makes every note cut immediately.

Learn INTENSITY to a fader and map a pad to Explode — you VJ the whole field by hand, perfectly in time.

Where the picture goes.

The on-screen view, plus fullscreen on any connected display, plus a Syphon server that hands the live frame to OBS, Resolume or VDMX with no capture card. macOS only.

Syphon is zero-copy on the GPU — cleaner and lighter than screen-capturing the window.

Record the visuals to a video file.

Renders an MP4 / H.264 clip with four aspect / format presets, muxed with sound — a ~12 s real-time audio ring buffer is written to an in-sync AAC track. Choose any duration from 1 to 600 s — but the clip is driven by that same ~12 s window, so anything longer repeats it, picture and sound together. macOS only (AVFoundation).

Set a custom duration and hit export at the drop — you get the picture and the audio locked together, ready to post.

Reset the field.

Wipes the particles and trail buffer back to the current image's rest state — a clean slate without reloading.

Hit Clear after a heavy Trails/Blast passage to instantly settle the picture.