Modular Sparks Nodegroup Asset (WIP)

Technical Support Particles and Physics Simulations
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1

I’m sharing this WIP of a Nodegroup as a reusable asset that you can plug into any Geometry Nodes Particle System you already have made and it will make points explode like sparks using various parameters like lifespan, speed, etc…

Each copy of the nodegroup you plug (in series) adds a “depth level” to the spark explosions (a particle explodes into n particles, which themselves explode into n particles, etc… kind of like a nuclear chain reaction, so the number of explosions grows exponentially and the simulation looks more fractal the more copies you plug).

Modular-sparks-v1.blend (869.3 KB)

I’m not completely stuck yet but motion blur is giving me a big headache, as it seems stabilizing particle ID using the Set ID node is not enough (there may be a bug or even 2 in Blender that need fixing). I’m partly sharing it to branch off of a devtalk discussion but also in case some of you know of any existing system like this, or in case you’d like to share an idea for it to work better.
Who knows, maybe this will spark some inspira- ok the door, yep, I know where it is.

2

So I still can’t get motion blur to cooperate when deleting particles (at least not when I have too many of them) despite assigning stable and unique IDs.

However, I found a solution by not deleting them. Instead I use an “alive” attribute which is then used by the material to make dead particles transparent. It gets slower the longer you play the animation, despite the average number of alive particles being the same, because every dead particle is still present in the scene.

Here are some results:

With a depth level of 1:

With a depth level of 2:

Still 2 but at 10 fps to better see what’s happening:

I think 3 would start getting confusing to watch with fast moving particles so I’ll stop there.

And here’s the new file:
Modular-sparks.blend (945.3 KB)