README.md

Protea

Compute boids with Triadica controls in WebGPU

Previews on https://webgpu.art/protea/

Based on https://webgpu.github.io/webgpu-samples/samples/computeBoids .

Search parameters:

• remote-control to enable remote control,
• control-host to set remote control host,
• control-port to set remote control port.

To use Protea, try Protea TypeScript workflow.

API

Main API of Protea is a function to pass buffers and shaders:

async function createRenderer(
  canvas: HTMLCanvasElement,
  computeOptions: {
    seedSize: number;
    seedData: Float32Array;
    params: number[];
    computeShader: string;
  },
  renderOptions: {
    vertexCount: number;
    vertexData: number[];
    vertexBufferLayout: GPUVertexBufferLayout[];
    indexData?: number[];
    renderShader: string;
  }
): RenderFn;

There are two phases running Protea demos:

• Compute shader to iterate ping/pong buffers, which hold information about points,
• Render shader to illustrate position and velocity of points.

The pipelines are reused, while parameters can be passed from main function.

This project is still in early stage and I used it for drawing interesting patterns.

Shaders

• #import protea::perspective to import uniform and perspective function.
• #import protea::colors to import hsl function for intuitive color definition.

Replace Parameters

To hot replace spin speed:

window.__hotUpdateParams([0.1, 1.6, 0.12, 0.7]);

4 paramters are:

• speed
• length of stroke
• width of stroke
• opacity

Bind Groups

Bindings in shader:

@group(0) @binding(0) var<uniform> uniforms: UniformData;
@group(0) @binding(1) var<uniform> params: Params;

@group(1) @binding(0) var<storage, read> particles_a: Particles;
@group(1) @binding(1) var<storage, read_write> particles_b: Particles;

shaders is mocked to be unified in both compute shader and fragment shader.

Licence

MIT