Basic particle system are actually not hard to implement. Especially since there are so many resources about this topic on the web. If you google “simple particle system”, you will find many youtube videos and text-based tutorials. One resource I can recommend is:
@Mugen87 Thanks for the resources, I’ll check it out. From what I’ve seen, it seems like the particle systems I linked are GPU-based, wouldn’t this make it a lot harder to implement? Also, I haven’t found any good resources on trail renderers, do you have any insights on that? I’ve seen the ExtrudeBufferGeometry, not sure if that’s what I’d need to use to make trails, since the points aren’t generated on the fly (need to specify curve ahead of time).
@Usnul Wow, that’s really amazing. Thanks for sharing, I’ll definitely check it out
I think it’s just something that a lot of people tend to gravitate towards. Tons of particles? - who doesn’t want that, right?
Well, in practice you don’t really need to run your simulation on the GPU, I found. If you have less that, say, 100,000 particles being simulated at a time - it’s not a huge deal to simulate them on the CPU.
My engine uses a mix of CPU and GPU for the simulation, sorting and physics are done on the CPU and parameter interpolation is done on the GPU from an encoded parameter texture.
For a real game you will probably want to have tens of different particle emitters in your scene at any given time, and only with a handful of particles each. Most of the emitters in my game have around 30-100 particles at any given time, that’s super low, but it’s not because the engine can’t handle more, it’s because that’s all that’s needed. I’m sure that doesn’t fit every use-case, but I do believe that it covers majority of common use-cases.
I am actively working on a full-featured particle system engine that is very similar to Unity’s Particle System for threejs. I open sourced it under MIT License.
