Particle Playground

Well this is the release of my latest little saunter into the world of particles and shaders in flash 10. It started off as and idea to use the new pixel bender shaders of flash 10 as a more efficient method of updating particle simulations.

Well after a few struggling evenings I managed to get a little prototype going. I was so amazed at some of the beautiful patterns and effects that the particles were making I thought it may be nice rather than just releasing a tech demo, to add abit more to it and release it for others to enjoy.

I will be releasing the source code in the coming weeks along with a blog post which should explain in detail how the technical aspects of updating and rendering tens of thousands of particles per frame works.

The tool features a gallery tab which you can use to take screenshots then upload them to my picassa account (proxyed via php). The hope is to get some realy beautiful images in here, perhaps if some are good enough ill get them printed and framed ;)

I hope to come back to this project regularly to add new features so stay tuned. For now some of the images I have made with this so far: