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.

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.