Creating particles

The process of creating and displaying particles looks as follows:

• Create a particle material

• Create a Particles instance, which will be used to contain and render the particles

• Use the Particle class to instantiate a particle (or more likely, a whole bunch), and pass material, size, and position as parameters to it

• Use the addParticle() method to add the particle(s) to the Particles object

The order of the first two steps is interchangeable because the particle material and the Particles instance do not need each other.

Using a Particles class, as well as a Particle class may sound confusing. The Particles instance is solely used to hold and render the Particle instances and, in fact, is a do3D. But the Particle instances are the actual particles and the applied material defines the way they look.

To create particles in Papervision3D we need materials that define their appearance. You can apply three types of material to a particle:

• ParticleMaterial: The most basic material...