Kanzi Particles 3.0.0¶

Kanzi Particles enables you to create GPU-driven particle systems for your Kanzi application.

Note

Kanzi Particles is a prerelease. Functionality, workflow, and API may change in future releases. To send questions, findings, or comments, use the Kanzi Support Portal at support.rightware.com. Set the Product field to Kanzi Particles when submitting a request.

Plugin architecture¶

Kanzi Particles uses a node + material-slot model. Each behavioural concern (how particles are spawned, how they are affected frame-to-frame, how they collide, how they render, and what events they emit) is expressed as a compute material assigned to a slot on one of four node types:

ParticleSystem: the container node. Holds a simulation and its emitters, affectors, and colliders.
ParticleEmitter: spawns particles. Takes an EmissionMaterial (what the particles look like at birth) and an EmissionCountMaterial (how many particles to spawn and when). Optionally takes a GenerateEventsMaterial to publish events that other emitters can subscribe to.
ParticleAffector: modifies live particles. Takes an AffectorMaterial. You can stack multiple affectors on one ParticleSystem.
ParticleCollider: prevents particles from entering a shape. Takes a ColliderMaterial.

Kanzi Particles ships a library of stock compute materials for each slot: see Working with… for the full catalog. You can also author your own compute materials; the stock materials are ordinary assets in the ParticlesAssetPackage Kanzi Studio project that you can copy and modify. See Writing custom compute materials.

For the common case — a standard shape emitter (box, sphere, disc, torus, point) preconfigured with sensible defaults — the asset package also ships drop-in prefabs that bundle the emission material, emission-count material, and a ParticleEmitter with the full property surface lifted to the prefab root. See Starting with templates.

Requirements¶

Kanzi Particles works with Kanzi 4.1.0 on:

Windows
Android

Contents of the plugin package¶

The plugin package includes:

assets directory contains the ParticlesAssetPackage Kanzi Studio project, a library of stock compute materials, render passes, textures, and prefabs. Add it as an Asset Package source in your Kanzi Studio project to use the stock catalog. See Setting up Kanzi Particles.
docs directory contains this documentation.
examples directory contains an example application project that demonstrates Kanzi Particles.
include directory contains the plugin header files.
lib directory contains the Kanzi Particles library files for supported platforms.

Installing Kanzi Particles¶

To install Kanzi Particles:

In Kanzi Portal, in the Studio tab, select your Kanzi Studio version on which you want to use Kanzi Particles.

Select the Feature Packs tab.
Download Kanzi Particles and extract the content of the zip file to the <KanziWorkspace>/Engine/plugins directory.

If the <KanziWorkspace>/Engine/plugins directory does not exist, create it.

After you install Kanzi Particles, set up the Kanzi Studio project where you want to use Kanzi Particles. See Setting up Kanzi Particles.