| name | threejs-procedural-vfx |
| description | Author production real-time VFX in Three.js. Use for ship-conforming reentry plasma, generated capsule wakes, instanced analytic sparks, timed dissolving debris, dense-swap effect pools, and explicit scene-relative HDR emission hierarchy. |
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.
