Particle Subemitter on GPU particles

Since GPU particles are way more performant than normal particles, I wanted to ask if there’s any chance we will get subemitters on GPU particles?

It seems like an extremely useful feature to create more advanced and performant particles systems.

Or is there any way I can simulate this using shader effects ?

cc @sebavan @Evgeni_Popov

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There is nothing planned for this and it seems really hard to build in webgl as we currently rely on transform feedbacks, Moving to other kind of storage might not be workable du to the amount of particles.

I can only think of it working with compute shaders but it would limit the feature to webgpu.

cc @Evgeni_Popov if he has an idea.

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Yes, it would be a bit complicated because it would mean we’d have to reimplement part of the particle system with compute shaders (and keep the js and GPU versions synchronized)…

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The main reason I was asking for this feature is because gpu particles, at least for my use cases felt very limited without subemitters, on the other hand, their performance was several orders of magnitude higher than normal particles.

That being said, if the requested feature seems unrealistic from a development point of view I can totally understand.

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The main issue with GPU particles is that everything needs to be written as a shader and the sub emitterc ode is quite complex

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Would you say attaching one or more GPU particle system(s) to a moving mesh would yield better performance than using a CPU particle system with subemitter ?

I think so

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