Particle overlay composer guide

Overview

Particle overlay composer stacks layers of moving light, meteors, nebulae, sparks, dust and lightning, over a star field or a picture of yours.

Orange and yellow streaks falling diagonally through soft orange clouds over a dense star field
The opening Meteor layer with a Nebula layer added and Bloom raised to 1.20. No picture underneath.

It is a particle system. Each layer is thousands of small shapes, each with its own start point, speed, size and lifetime. The GPU draws them all at once with instancing, so a layer of 5,000 streaks still moves smoothly.

There are five kinds of layer: a meteor layer of streaks, a nebula layer of soft clouds, a spark layer of bursts, a dust layer of drifting motes, and a lightning layer of branching bolts. Each layer takes its colours from one gradient.

The light of every layer is added together, which is additive blending, into a picture that can hold light far brighter than white. That is HDR inside the tool.

Bloom then takes the brightest parts, blurs them and lays them back on top, the way a lens glows around a highlight. The bloom threshold decides what counts as bright. Finally exposure and tone mapping fold all that light back into what a screen can show.

Open Particle overlay composer Start here

In this guide

  1. StartWhat you need, your first scene, and how to save it.
  2. Every controlEvery control in the panel, one line each.
  3. Three looksThree scenes and the settings that made them.
  4. Keep your workThe PNG, the project file and the presets.
  5. KeysPause, restart, save the project, and the lab's one shortcut.
  6. HelpWhat to do when something goes wrong.

It needs a browser with WebGL 2. Your picture is read on your device and never uploaded. The scene draws itself; the frame does not respond to clicks, drags or touches, and everything is in the panel.