WebGL Particle System

A particle system implemented in WebGL utilising a Frame-Buffer-Object (FBO) approach for efficient renderering. The project was originally heavily inspired by the original WebGL FBO system on the web http://barradeau.com/blog/?p=621 however, it has since moved on to utilise Three.js's inbuilt GPUComputationRenderer to handle the ping-pong rendering explained below.

The simulation is written with Three.js and utilises a pair of off-screen render-targets and a 'ping-pong' rendering approach to efficiently utilise the GPU for computation. At each step an appropriate shader is selected on the FBO mesh, and the renderer reads from the texture on one render target, and renders into the other. At the next step the targets are swapped.

On a computer with an NVIDIA 1070 and AMD Ryzen 5 2600, the system easily handled displaying 16,777,216 (4096^2) static particles at ~30 FPS, static in this context meaning a shader displaying the particles in place without velocity, rather than disabling camera rotation.

Running

This project is written in a mixture of Typescript and Javascript and uses Webpack + Babel for development.

To develop:

• Run npm install to install dependencies
• Run npm run start:dev to start the development server on port 8080 (this can be changed in the package.json)