Hi @Ned_Benson, happy to help out with your questions. When you are dealing with particles, you generally want to think in terms of adding to your background and when your background starts as white, there’s no headroom to add. You could use a different blend mode for your particles but you won’t get the sense of light coming from the particles with a blend mode other than add.
With the playground in your last post using the sun system in blue, even though the clear color in the scene is white, there is a dark blue base to the system. Consider these lines:
// Create core sphere
var coreSphere = BABYLON.MeshBuilder.CreateSphere("coreSphere", {diameter: 2.01, segments: 64}, scene);
// Create core material
var coreMat = new BABYLON.StandardMaterial("coreMat", scene)
coreMat.emissiveColor = new BABYLON.Color3(0, 0.0930, 0.3773);
// Assign core material to sphere
coreSphere.material = coreMat;
This section of the code is creating a sphere with an emissive color of a very dark blue. We use an emissive color so that the sphere is not affected by any lights in the scene and will always render as the same dark blue. The particles are also relatively dark blue and during their life gradate from transparent to 50% opaque and back to transparent. When you add these together, you will get the glowing effect through a lot of layers of particles. Adding many dark colors together will give you a lot of depth in your particle system and can still get very bright tones in your particles. To demonstrate this, I created this graphic for you because it becomes very obvious when looking at it.
The background color is the color used on the sphere in the center of the particle system. Each image from left to right is one particle of the same color added to the ones below and rotated. So at the left of the image is one particle, and at the right is eight added together. You can see that we are getting much brighter tones with just 8 layers so thousands of particles can definitely reach areas of white which will resemble cast light or glow.
You can also add to this effect by using particle textures that have broad, soft edges like this:
With all of the blended tones adding together, your particles will really feel emissive so you can really leverage the texture to add to the effect. While you could go with a post process glow effect to add to this it will be an expensive rendering addition that can be done with simple texture and color authoring to make the particles look like they are glowing.
I hope this helps you when planning and authoring your particle systems and feel free to drop playgrounds into the thread if you need some help tuning them.
