| Submitted by , posted on 20 August 2002 |

Image Description, by I recently created a fairly nice particle system, and since i'm getting a bit tired of seeing dull looking games up here almost each and every day i decided it was time to post something different ;) So here it is.. In case you're interested, it's actually really simple. One just takes an ordinary type of particle system (this one being based on emitters spitting particles in certain or random (tweakable) directions, influenced by gravity), then sets up a lot of them, let's say 16.000 (at least). Next step is rendering everything to a texture, i used a 512*512 32-bit one, which seems not to kill my GPU all that much (Gf2MX). Each frame you draw the full particle system, and afterwards draw a view-port filling black plane with the alpha set to something like 12 (on a 0 to 255 scale). Voila, motion blur. This leaves nice trails. Fiddling around with the particle size, position, type of motion, blur factor and other things gives fairly to really nice results.
I know that the implementation isn't really efficient for smaller particle systems (where you're better off just overdrawing a few particles to the actual render target), but for somewhat impressive effects this might be applicable.
What the hell am i ranting about, this function ain't anything near advanced, it just looks okay. But hey, i "had" to write something in order to get this image thru the preselection ;)
Sources and help on other topics can be obtained thru: niels@breezahgirls.net ;)
Cheers,
plek/Damage

[prev] | Image of the Day Gallery www.flipcode.com | [next]

Copyright 1999-2008 (C) FLIPCODE.COM and/or the original content author(s). All rights reserved.
Please read our Terms, Conditions, and Privacy information.