Editing Particle system (section)

=== Rendering stage ===
After the update is complete, each particle is rendered, usually in the form of a [[texture mapped|textured]] [[sprite (computer graphics)|billboarded]] [[Quadrilateral|quad]] (i.e. a quadrilateral that is always facing the viewer). However, this is sometimes not necessary for games; a particle may be rendered as a single pixel in small resolution/limited processing power environments. Conversely, in motion graphics particles tend to be full but small-scale and easy-to-render 3D models, to ensure fidelity even at high resolution. Particles can be rendered as [[Metaballs]] in off-line rendering; [[isosurface]]s computed from particle-metaballs make quite convincing liquids. Finally, 3D mesh objects can "stand in" for the particles — a snowstorm might consist of a single 3D snowflake mesh being duplicated and rotated to match the positions of thousands or millions of particles.<ref>{{cite book
| vauthors   = Sims K 
| title = Proceedings of the 17th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
| chapter = Particle animation and rendering using data parallel computation
| date       = 1990-09-01
| chapter-url        = https://www.karlsims.com/papers/ParticlesSiggraph90.pdf
| volume     = 
| pages      = 405–413
| doi        = 10.1145/97879.97923
| pmc        = 
| pmid       = 
| isbn = 0897913442
| s2cid = 2791741
| access-date = 2022-01-17
}}</ref>