Enhancing the Control and Performance of Particle Systems through the Use of Local Environments

The creation, behavior, and performance of particle systems in computer graphics has been a balance between control, visual accuracy, and CPU utilization since their inception. A tradeoff must be made between a physically-accurate visual representation and computation time. The most mathematically-correct way to represent particle systems is through the application of Newton’s laws of motion. This solution, in which the particles are aware of each other, can be computationally expensive, usually to the order of θ(N), where N is the number of particles in the system. A new and better way of representing, controlling, and modifying the behavior of particle systems is proposed and demonstrated. Here, in addition to the global environment that determines the behavior of particles everywhere in space, the particles move through a set of localized environments, in which each environment acts only on those particles that are within the confines of a particular environment. With this system, the parameters of each localized environment are adjusted and provide fine control over the behavior of the particles, thereby producing visual results comparable to those that would be obtained from a physically-correct solution in which the particles interact with each other. The proposed method results in a significantly improved performance of θ(N·L), where L is the number of localized environments. By changing the parameters of the local environments, a high degree of flexibility in the types of phenomena being modeled can be obtained, thereby allowing the same program to simulate a wide variety of physical systems.