OpenGL Particle System

A simple particle system implemented in OpenGL 4.6.

（Also project for Zhejiang University 2022-2023 Spring Computer Animation master course）

The application contains a single particle emitter, and some settings of the particle system can be set through the 'Particle System' panel.

Build

CMake is used to build this project.

C++20 is needed.

glslangValidator should be in PATH.

Used Thirdparty

• glad
• glfw
• glm
• Dear ImGui
• stb
• cmrc

Details

There are 4 main parts in the particle system:

• emit - Particles will be emitted every emit_interval frames. Each new particle has an random initial position and velocity, and the initial accelerator is zero. See emit.comp.
• update - Update particles using Verlet method. A force input from UI, gravity and drag force are considered. See update.comp.
• compact - Compact array of particles due to dead particles every compact_interval frames. A two-level scan on GPU is performed to compute the new indices in the array for each particle (see scan1.comp, scan2.comp and scan3.comp), and then living particles are copied to the new position (see compact.comp).
• draw - Render each particle as a billboard using instanced draw call. See draw.vert and draw.frag.