SPS on the go !

[jerome]

to be continued here : http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/18512-sps-finished/?p=104986

 

at last ...

[Wingnut]

Its one mesh, and not all one mesh. sigh.  How the hell did you do this, Jerome? 

 

I thought... hmm.  Remember that playground... with the depth render issue?  All the particles were either behind something, or in-front-of something, but they could not be BOTH.  Remember? 

 

I thought... that was caused... by all the particles being a single mesh... and the depth renderer treated it so, and thus there was problems.

 

But you... how the hell?  The depth render/alpha-thingy is gone, with SPS? 

 

How the hell...  ???  You're a maniac, J-man.  Too good.

 

That's the 4th BJS trophy for you, ya know?

 

1.  Spherical Harmonics - skyrocket to fame and fortune

2.  Parametric Shapes

3.  Options Parameters/Meshbuilder

4.  Solid Particle Sprayer 

 

Good lookin' trophy case, Jerome!  Well done!

[jerome]

You know, I did no magic

 

Remember there was a discussion between DK, Jahow and Fenomas about the issues of the legacy Particle System when dealing  with z-sort or alpha. These were design choices for performance reasons and because the particles were 2D quads drawn on top of the screen layer.

 

The ol'good BJS classical abstract mesh then remained the best object in terms of z-sort, blending, alpha, etc.

So I didn't re-invent anything.

 

I just got this ol'good BJS mesh and made it a particle system in order to keep as much as possible all its features and capabilities. I just got the benefit that if I were using a real mesh, then I could make solid particles rotating in the space instead of only 2D quad ever facing the camera.

 

The real challenge was to optimize all the very numerous 3D computations CPU side : each solid particle is applied, in brief, quite the same process than what the World Matrix does GPU side for a whole standard mesh (+ here : dynamic updates for colors, uvs and user custom logic).

The SPS mesh is modified, updated, rebuild each frame, particle per particle, then passed to the GPU for its usual process : world transformation, view transformation, etc. These GPU processes apply only on the whole mesh : SPS rotation (not particle rotation), translation, camera moves, etc.

 

So the SPS is a real BJS standard mesh. It should have the same weaknesses and powers than its brothers   : as you can display a sphere in the middle of a torus, you can display a sphere within a SPS.

[MasterSplinter]

I dunno if I am doing something wrong in my set up...  But, the Mesh that is created with SPS has no id or name -- you have to look it up by it's array value. 

[jerome]

https://github.com/BabylonJS/Babylon.js/blob/master/src/Particles/babylon.solidParticleSystem.ts#L107

 

ooops

seems to be a bug here

this should be this.name instead of name

 

I'll fix it next week

 

I don't get how this could passed the TS compilation

[jerome]

PRed

[Jon DevoS]

hi guys i am super new in babylon
and i have some question, when mesh moves behind camera she disabled?
any suggestion how to solve it?
here is PG https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#WCDZS#81
sorry for my bad english and maybe wrong theme

solved

SPS.mesh.alwaysSelectAsActiveMesh = true;
:)

[Guest]

well done

[jerome]

everything is explained here : http://doc.babylonjs.com/how_to/solid_particles#sps-visibility