Panda's Particle System

General Discussion
1

Just wanted to ask… On a scale of 1 to 10, how good is Panda’s Particle System?

Right now my Heroine’s weapon has some nice aura effects on them that do not use P3D’s built in particle system.

I figured if Panda’s particle system was powerful enough, I might reconstruct the auras using it; but then again, particles can break fps.

Normally, if you want a serious looking particle effect you would have to have a substantial amount of particles. The more particles you have the more fps usually breaks; especially on particle close-ups.

Hum… I might be better off keeping my current effect, which puts no burden on the fps what so ever.

If there’s any example programs of some really good particle effects done with P3D, I would love to view them. I’ve seen one or two videos on You tube (I think), but the videos I saw were less then mediocre.

No big deal though. I just feel I should get to know the P3D particle system just incase and do not totally leave it in the closet.

2

I’ll be honest: the particle system is kind of meh. You can do some awesome effects with it, but you do have to work at it.

David

3

For low frequency effects, you can render the particles to a scaled down offscreen buffer (ex: 1/4 of main resolution), then composite the low res particles with the main render.

More explanations here : http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch23.html

4

Before I used to think panda3d particles where meh myself. But comparing it to other realtime engines like this unity3d.com/support/documentatio … stems.html
all I could find missing where the particle colliders and “Mesh Particle Emitter” emitter type.

There really isn’t much documentation on Panda particles (yet), but it doesn’t mean it’s bad
panda3d.org/manual/index.php/User:Community