Weather Particles
These particle systems were created in PopcornFX to represent different weather conditions while still being performant on mobile Augmented Reality platforms. This section shows part of the work that I did for my most recent project with Fabridge Inc.
Brewing a Storm
The clouds use flipbooks of “slices” of a simulation created in Blender. These were layered on top of one another to approximate a volumetric effect.
Variability
Using attributes in the PopcornFX editor this spawner can be controlled from code to use one .pkfx package to simulate multiple severities of cloud systems, from a light drizzle to a heavy storm.
Other Systems
Just two simple billboard textures pushed to emissive color levels.
Because of the limited power of the hardware and the youth of the engine we were constrained on the features of PopcornFX we could use. This meant no mesh particles, no light particles, and no noise or texture samplers just to name a few. I would have much preferred to use motion vectors to smooth out the animation especially since I am playing on threes here to save on texture memory usage.