Crytek Sponza demo

Released as part of the source examples for the 4.1 Alpha launch, this was one of the more advanced tech demos showing off the new multi-pass rendering feature in Away3D. The demo uses the famous Sponza Atrium model, a creative commons resource from Crytek, regularly used as a test model for complex shading scenes.

Multiple point lightsources from the flaming torches combine with a shadow-mapped global directional lightsource and fog effect to create an atmospheric experience. The advanced culling systems in Away3D reduce overdraw in the scene for the lights as well as the objects in order to achieve a smoothly-rendering 1st person experience.

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Particle Explosion

As one of the new features in Away3D 4.1, we wanted to test the speed and amount of particles we could get running with the particle animator classes.

The results were pretty impressive: this particular demo has a total of 131,072 particles being independently animated at 60 fps. The particles are also lit by two lightsources in realtime. Because all positional data is calculated directly on the GPU, the test uses very little CPU cycles, making it idea for real-world use in complex scenes.

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Fire effect

Experimenting more with the particles animator, we wanted to try and simulate some effects that you might imagine being used in-game. The first one we tried was the fairly commonly seen fire effect.

Because particles can use any material type, we chose to create a collection of billboards with a circular color gradient on the texture, then apply an ADD blendmode to the resulting mesh so that each particle appears with a soft edge. We could have also approached this with a transparent png texture for the particle, however, the blendmode approach generally has a more consistent performance across GPUs.

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