Beginning with Particles
Entry posted by Josh ·
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I wanted to work on something a bit different, and this sure is different. I've got a framework of a new particle system worked out. What's really special about this system is the amount of interactivity the particles will allow.
- Particle-world collisions.
- Particle-particle collisions (repulsion)
- Particle-particle cohesion (fluids with surface tension)
Instead of just being a visual effect, I want our new particles to be fully interactive with physics so that particles can exert forces on objects. This will allow you to simulate fluids, smoke, and other effects in a realistic manner, not just dumb collision of particles bounding off walls. It should even be possible to simulate hydrophobic and hydrophillic liquids if you mix two together with different cohesion values.
Basically what I want is something like Nvidia Flow on the CPU and exerting forces on the world. So if you had water falling on a water wheel the wheel would move because of the forces, or a blast of wind could knock objects over without any special force fields or other fake effects.
I also have a technique worked out that will allow lighting of clouds and other masses of gas, with back-scattering.
Emitters can be instanced so if you have one really high-quality torch effect, for example, you can instance it and use it as much as you like without any additional computational cost per instance.
Particle emitters can be controlled with a Lua script or C++ actor. Two new functions are available, UpdateParticle() and EmitParticle(). Here is a script that controls particle behavior over time:
entity.particleVelocity = Vec3(0,0,1) entity.particleAcceleration = Vec3(0,-1,0) entity.inverseSquareFalloff = true entity.particleRadiusBegin = 0.1 entity.particleRadiusEnd = 0.2 entity.particleColorBegin = Vec4(1,1,1,1) entity.particleColorEnd = Vec4(1,1,1,0) entity.particleMass = 1 entity.particleSpin = 5 function entity:Start() self.particleColorBeginHSL = HSL(self.particleColorBegin.rgb) self.particleColorEndHSL = HSL(self.particleColorEnd.rgb) local emitter = Emitter(self) if emitter == nil then return end local n for n = 1, #emitter.particles do emitter.particles[n].mass = self.particleMass emitter.particles[n].falloff = (n-1) / (#emitter.particles - 1) end end function entity:EmitParticle(index) local emitter = Emitter(self) if emitter == nil then return end emitter.particles[index].position = self:GetPosition(true) emitter.particles[index].velocity = TransformVector(self.particleVelocity,self,nil) emitter.particles[index].radius = self.particleRadiusBegin emitter.particles[index].color = self.particleColorBegin end function entity:UpdateParticle(index) local emitter = Emitter(self) if emitter == nil then return end emitter.particles[index].velocity = emitter.particles[index].velocity + self.particleAcceleration / 60 local falloff = emitter.particles[index].falloff if self.inverseSquareFalloff then falloff = falloff * falloff end emitter.particles[index].color.rgb = RGB(self.particleColorBeginHSL * (1 - falloff) + self.particleColorEndHSL * falloff) emitter.particles[index].color.a = self.particleColorBegin.a * (1 - falloff) + self.particleColorEnd.a * falloff emitter.particles[index].radius = self.particleRadiusBegin * (1 - falloff) + self.particleRadiusEnd * falloff emitter.particles[index].rotation = emitter.particles[index].rotation + self.particleSpin / 60 end
A different script could be used to make particles emit from vertices of a model, to make the model appear to be on fire, or other effects. This will allow infinite customization to create any behavior you want.
Particle physics will be calculated on the physics thread so I expect them to be very fast.
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