Day 3: I Asked an AI to Spin a Particle Globe Forever
A sphere made of nothing but glowing dots, spinning and pulsing forever, built from a brief instead of a single line of shader code.
Context & Who It’s For
Day 3 of my build log with Heramotion. Today’s clip drops the interface graphics from Day 1 and the seasonal props from Day 2 for something plainer on paper and harder to pull off: a single sphere built entirely from small glowing dots, floating on a deep navy background, rotating and breathing for fifteen seconds with no visible seam.
This one is for anyone who sells tech, AI, data, or science b-roll on Adobe Stock, Envato, or Pond5. A glowing globe shows up in more listings than almost any other tech visual, global networks, blockchain, cloud computing, medical scans, satellite tracking. A clean version that actually loops and carries no logos or fake statistics slots into all of them. The full 15-second loop is on YouTube:
The Problem
A sphere built from dots instead of a 3D model has to fake every cue a real render would give away for free. The dots sit in rings that circle the sphere like lines of latitude, but if the spacing along each ring stays even, the whole thing reads as a wireframe grid instead of a loose scatter of points. Light and shadow have to come from density and brightness alone, dots crowd together and glow brighter on one side, thin out and dim on the other, with no shading, no highlight, no drawn gradient doing the work.
Depth is its own problem. Dots on the near face need to sit sharp and bright. Dots on the far side need to show through faintly, dimmer and a little blurred, so the ball reads as hollow rather than a solid painted circle. Layer seven separate motions on top of that, rotation, a slight shear between rings, individual dots flaring in brightness, a pulse that ripples out from the center, a bright patch drifting around the surface, color regions migrating on their own, a soft glow breathing at a different pace again, and the rotation still has to land on exactly one full turn by the fifteen-second mark. Get any of that out of sync and the sphere looks like a spinning sticker instead of a living particle field.
What Actually Makes It Work
One brief, one agent session. Heramotion’s Create tab turns a written brief straight into a working HTML and GSAP composition in one run, no timeline, no manual keyframes. The brief behind this clip runs about 70 lines, and most of it is spent describing what the sphere is made of before a single motion gets mentioned.
Steering mid-run. If the dots on one side bunch too tight and start reading as a hard edge, you can type a correction into the running session instead of restarting the whole build.
Renders that repeat exactly. The same brief produces the same output every time, so a version that clears review today still clears it next week with a small palette swap.
Continuation for the next round. Reopen a finished composition and ask for a different color pairing or a tighter dot count, without redoing the density and depth work that already reads correctly.
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A style guide that grows with you. Rate a finished piece, thumbs up or down with a short note, and Heramotion folds that note into a standing set of preferences. Day 3 already carries forward what Day 1 and Day 2 got right about staggering and easing.
Why It Matters
A dot sphere is one of the most reused shapes in stock footage, which means most versions of it look identical. A globe that rotates as one rigid unit, with every dot brightening on the same beat, reads as a screensaver, something a buyer has already scrolled past a hundred times. A globe where the rings shear against each other, the bright patch drifts at its own pace, and individual dots flare and settle on staggered clocks reads as data in motion instead of a spinning prop. That difference is what separates a clip that sits unused in a library from one that ends up behind a product launch or a research explainer.
How To Apply It
- Set up Agent Motion first. Sign up free at b.ai (https://chat.b.ai/chat?invite_code=A9788N), grab a key from the key page (https://chat.b.ai/key), then in Heramotion Settings pick Agent Motion, set the provider to Custom (OpenAI-compatible), and paste that key in. It’s an Alpha Access feature.
- Write the brief as a spec, not a mood. Name the background color in hex, and describe the sphere by its construction rule, dots on latitude rings with uneven spacing, not a mesh, not a wireframe, not a solid surface.
- Separate light from shading. Say the light direction comes from where dots crowd and brighten, never from a drawn highlight or gradient overlay.
- List every animation as its own numbered behavior, each running at a different rate. “Ring drift, independent of rotation” beats “the sphere moves.”
- Pick an engine in the Create tab. Claude Code, Kimi Code, OpenCode, and Agent Motion are the four options, each spawning its own CLI except Agent Motion, which runs in-app.
- Watch the render, then rate it. A short note on what to fix carries into your next brief on its own.
- Send the clip to the queue for a ZIP preview or a full ProRes master, then let the app write the title and keywords before export.
Creative Directions
- A warmer palette. Swap the green and cyan for gold and copper for a finance or luxury listing, same ring and density rules underneath.
- Vertical crop. Shrink the sphere and push it toward the top third of a 9:16 frame, leaving open space below for a buyer’s own caption.
- Two spheres in orbit. Add a second, smaller dot shell drifting slowly around the first, for a listing aimed at partnership or connectivity themes.
- A monochrome pass. Render the same brief in a single color family, blue only or amber only, for buyers who need the clip to sit quietly behind text.
Real Brief Example
Here’s the actual brief, pasted as written, no edits:
Make a 15-second ANIMATED particle globe, seamlessly loopable, with no text
or lettering of any kind anywhere in the frame.
THE FORM:
A deep navy background (#0A1236, deepening to #050A24 at the corners). A
single large sphere sits centred in the frame, occupying roughly 55% of the
frame height, built entirely from small glowing dots — no solid surface, no
wireframe mesh, no drawn outline. The sphere reads as a ball only because of
how its dots are distributed in space.
The dots sit on the sphere's surface arranged in horizontal latitude rings
that run around it, the rings spaced evenly from pole to pole. Along each
ring, dot spacing is uneven — dots cluster densely in some stretches and thin
into gaps in others, so the surface reads as an irregular scattered shell
rather than a regular grid. Some rings run nearly complete; others break into
short arcs.
Density and brightness build toward the sphere's right and lower-right edge,
where dots crowd into a bright dense rim, and thin out toward its upper left,
where individual dots sit sparse and dim against the dark. This gives the ball
a clear light direction without any drawn shading.
Each dot is a small round point with a soft bloom halo, the brightest ones
blowing out slightly toward white. Dot size varies — larger and softer near
the sphere's silhouette edge, smaller and sharper across its face.
DEPTH: dots on the sphere's near face are sharp and bright; dots on its far
side show through faintly, dimmer and softly blurred, so the ball reads as
transparent and hollow rather than solid. A shallow depth-of-field falloff
softens the dots nearest the camera at the sphere's centre.
PALETTE: emerald green (#2FD46B), spring green (#7BE88F), bright cyan
(#3BC9E8), cerulean blue (#2E7BD4), deep blue (#1B3FA8), on the dark navy
field. Colour is distributed across the surface — greens dominating some
regions, blues and cyans others — blending gradually where they meet, never as
hard boundaries. No purple, no violet.
COMPOSITION: the sphere is centred with generous dark space around it on all
sides, and stays inside a 5% safe margin from the frame edges.
REQUIRED CONTINUOUS ANIMATION — all running simultaneously, each completing a
whole number of cycles across the 15 seconds so the loop is seamless:
1. ROTATION: the entire dot shell rotates continuously around the sphere's
vertical axis at constant linear speed, dots travelling around their
latitude rings, passing from the bright near face around to the dim far
side and back. Exactly one full revolution across the 15 seconds.
2. RING DRIFT: individual latitude rings rotate at very slightly different
rates from one another, so the shell shears gently rather than turning as
one rigid object.
3. DOT BREATHING: individual dots pulse in brightness at staggered offsets,
some flaring briefly brighter before settling, so the surface always
shimmers.
4. RADIAL PULSE: a slow wave travels from the sphere's centre outward to its
silhouette edge and repeats, briefly pushing dots a fraction further from
the core and brightening them as it passes.
5. DENSITY SHIFT: the dense bright region drifts slowly around the sphere at a
different rate from the rotation, so the apparent light direction changes
over time.
6. COLOUR DRIFT: green and blue regions migrate slowly across the surface,
independent of both the rotation and the density shift.
7. AMBIENT GLOW: a soft bloom around the sphere breathes slowly in intensity,
brightest where the dot density is highest.
Motion is smooth and continuous — constant linear speed on the rotation,
`power2.inOut` on the radial pulse, breathing and drift cycles. No hard cuts,
no glitch, no distortion, no flicker. Elegant, scientific, premium
technology mood.
ABSOLUTELY NO TEXT: no words, letters, numerals, captions, statistics,
percentages, watermarks, labels, or lettering of any kind in any part of the
frame.Pitfalls & Fixes
- The dots line up into a visible grid. State the spacing rule directly: uneven along each ring, dense in stretches, thin into gaps, some rings breaking into short arcs instead of running whole.
- The sphere reads as flat or solid. Drop any mention of shading or highlights. Depth comes from near dots staying sharp and bright while far-side dots show through dim and blurred.
- Rotation and the bright patch drift look identical. Give them different rates in the brief. One turn per fifteen seconds for the rotation, a separate slower or faster cycle for the density shift.
- Everything pulses on the same beat. Every motion line needs its own offset language, “staggered,” “independent,” “a different rate from,” so no two systems read as the same clock.
Case Mini
A brief that just says “a sphere of dots that rotates” gives the agent a single knob to turn, every dot moving together like a spinning disco ball with nothing else going on. The brief above splits that one motion into seven layered ones, rotation, ring shear, dot flares, a pulse wave, a drifting bright patch, migrating color, breathing glow, each on its own clock. Same one sphere, same dot count. One version looks like a loading spinner. The other looks like a small planet actually doing something.
Wrap-Up
Day 3’s lesson: the illusion of a solid sphere came entirely from density and brightness rules, not from any drawn shading, and giving each of the seven motions its own independent rate is what kept the surface from settling into one flat texture. Day 4 is a different genre again. Want to build your own version of today’s clip? Start with the free Demo, then move to Alpha Access once you’re ready for the full engine lineup and 8K export.
Keywords
particle globe, motion graphics, AI animation, seamless loop, tech background, data visualization, microstock, Adobe Stock, Heramotion, stock video, GSAP, prompt engineering
Try It Yourself
Heramotion is still in Alpha. Expect rough edges and the occasional bug. It’s $14.99 right now, and the price goes up once it reaches a stable release. You’ll also need your own API key, so the price above doesn’t cover usage.
Get Alpha Access here: Download Alpha
Want to try the workflow first, free? Heramotion Demo runs on Claude Code alone, capped at 1080p and 8 seconds. It’s an early build too, Windows and Mac only.
Try the free Demo here: Download Demo
