Tutorials Used

There was one excellent tutorial I used at InformIT this helped me understand buffer objects and their manipulation better. Most of the systems used in the particle engine were developed from my experience coding a 2D particle engine in python.

Features

The particle engine can handle a significant number of particles in real-time, and computes full phong shading for each particle.

• 60 fps
• 500,000 individual particles
• Full lighting
• Semi-functional transparancy
• Hierarchical Positioning

Goal

The goal of the project was to create a particle system capable of simulating glass shards from a broken window, or a cloud of dust. The baseline I aimed for was 100,000 3D particles at 60fps guessing that it would perform at least 4 times faster than a 2D python based particle engine I wrote in high school.

Sparkle particle system

By: Andrew McMuldroch