lumoslab-innovation/3d-lab-skills/threejs-procedural-vfx

Procedural VFX

Build effects from an event envelope, motion field, geometry representation, and shading response. Avoid independent particle emitters that happen to share a color.

Effect graph

ship/event state
  → effect-specific geometry or instance attributes
  → flow-facing masks or analytic age
  → material response
  → pool/lifetime ownership
  → HDR and bloom contribution

Read references/procedural-vfx-system.md for ship-conforming reentry shells, capsule wakes, dense instanced spark/debris pools, HDR hierarchy, and implementation limits.

Read the reentry plasma implementation for closed layered wake shells, flow-axis deformation, advected filament fields, opacity shaping, and additive emission diagnostics.

Rules

• Every layer must have a role in silhouette, motion, illumination, or residue.
• Use normalized lifetime curves instead of scattered time constants.
• Derive secondary motion from the same flow or event direction.
• Keep bloom as a response to HDR emission, not as the effect's only shape.
• Pool instances and trails; do not allocate per burst.
• Expose spawn, simulation, overdraw, and luminance debug views.
• Include a non-bloom baseline that remains legible.

Routing boundary

Use $threejs-temporal-surfaces only for the screen-space frost/touch-history pipeline. Use $threejs-precipitation-surfaces for falling rain or snow, splash flipbooks, and weather events that alter ground materials. Keep ship-space plasma, generated wakes, sparks, and pooled debris in this skill.

Source: Scott Sun, MIT. Adapted by LumosLab: example assets remain linked to pinned upstream source; skill instructions and references are bundled. See LICENSE.