Desirable Elements for a Particle System Interface

Particle systems have many applications, with the most popular being to produce special effects in video games and films. To permit particle systems to be created quickly and easily, Particle System Interfaces (PSIs) have been developed. A PSI is a piece of software designed to perform common tasks related to particle systems for clients, while providing them with a set of parameters whose values can be adjusted to create different particle systems. Most PSIs are inflexible, and when clients require functionality that is not supported by the PSI they are using, they are forced to either find another PSI that meets their requirements or, more commonly, create their own particle system or PSI from scratch. This paper presents three original contributions. First, it identifies 18 features that a PSI should provide in order to be capable of creating diverse effects. If these features are implemented in a PSI, clients will be more likely to be able to accomplish all desired effects related to particle systems with one PSI. Secondly, it introduces a novel use of events to determine, at run time, which particle system code to execute in each frame. Thirdly, it describes a software architecture called the Dynamic Particle System Framework (DPSF). Simulation results show that DPSF possesses all 18 desirable features. 1. Introduction A particle system is a structure used to control the behavior of many elements called particles, where a particle is an object with some properties such as position, velocity, and size. Particle systems are typically implemented in software, and each particle is visualized on screen as a colored pixel, a texture (i.e., an image), or a polygon. Particle systems are widely used in video games and films to generate special effects and model fuzzy objects that do not have well-defined shapes, such as fire, smoke, flowing liquids, dust, clouds, fog, snow, rain, hair, fur, sparks, explosions, and abstract visual effects such as magic spells and glowing trails. These effects help immerse viewers in virtual environments by adding detail to them, as well as by making them more attractive. In addition to creating special effects, particle systems have many practical and research applications, such as visualizing and controlling implicit surfaces [1–6] and mesh deformation [5, 7]. When creating a particle system, a number of issues confront the client, where the client is the person creating the particle system, such as a designer or programmer. These issues include deciding how the particles should be drawn, how the particles should be managed