Particle movement over mesh surface

Hi All,

Im wondering if someone could shed some light on how marshmallowlaserfeast creates those particle flows for their nature exhibits.

Im not looking for tutorials or anything but more a very broad suggestion on how these things are done. Are they just moving by mesh normals ? is it texture / vector map based ? splines ?

Im interested in creating something like this for a project we are working on and as my vvvv skills really arent up to this level im thinking of recreating it in 3dsmax and tyflow. I feel like I could recreate it using manual spline shapes and directing the particles along those but somehow I feel thats not whats happening here.

Edit : After doing a bit more research I think they might just actually be doing this in houdini with fluid sims so probably a more or less traditional particle setup.

Not really a VVVV question then, still interested in alternative takes.

Those are vvvv, but some trails are prepared in Houdini. And then there might also be vector fields involved for others. I‘d say it‘s a mix of different techniques - but data is preprocessed outside of vvvv.