Non-Java 3D Approaches

More Particle Systems

Chapter 5 of the Java 3D tutorial (Interaction and Animation) has a section on the GeometryUpdater interface and illustrates it with a LineArray particle system for a fountain. It's similar to my LineArray example but uses a different algorithm for updating the positions of the lines, and it utilizes the Geometry argument of the updateDate( ) method rather than accessing global float arrays.

Sun's Java 3D Demo page (http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/demos/) contains two examples by Jeff White showing the use of lines and points to create a swirl of particles that change color.

A Java 3D package for writing particle systems is available at j3d.org (http://code.j3d.org/). It utilizes triangleArrays or QuadArrays and supports attributes for position, color, texture, aging, wind movement, and forces. It supports collision detection through picking and allows bounding boxes to be set to limit movement. It was written by Daniel Selman (the author of the Java 3D Programming text); the package is currently an alpha version.

Artur Biesiadowski has a beautiful particle system demo available at http://nwn-j3d.sourceforge.net/misc/particles.jara mass of glowing, flickering colored clouds of light speeding around and through a central location in space.