Basically to render this effect, you blit a quad to a texture with multiply blending, with the darkness of the quad being how fast you want the "gel" to return to it's normal "shape", and then you blit the particles on top with add blending. The quad darkens the previous frame, and as a result, the frame before that, and before that, etc which still exist within the image to some degree until eventually those areas that have not been written over again become black.
It just occured to me that one could get an interesting effect if one were to adjust the hue of the quad being used to darken the previous passes. Then the background would have psychadelic shifts in hue.
If I'm not mistaken, the colors we're seeing here are just a result of the particles themselves being colored, thus the white areas. I think the effect I describe above would work best if the particles moved about rather than simply appearing in one location one frame. Otherwise you wouldn't get color trails with shifting hues.
Hm... just looked at the demo... Yhe particles you have are moving... in odd ways! What's going on there? Are the particles being affected by the gravity of nearby particles, or are they following the contours of the gel map, moving to the lowest point? That's something I didn't expect to see!
It just occured to me that one could get an interesting effect if one were to adjust the hue of the quad being used to darken the previous passes. Then the background would have psychadelic shifts in hue.
If I'm not mistaken, the colors we're seeing here are just a result of the particles themselves being colored, thus the white areas. I think the effect I describe above would work best if the particles moved about rather than simply appearing in one location one frame. Otherwise you wouldn't get color trails with shifting hues.
Hm... just looked at the demo... Yhe particles you have are moving... in odd ways! What's going on there? Are the particles being affected by the gravity of nearby particles, or are they following the contours of the gel map, moving to the lowest point? That's something I didn't expect to see!