nparticle

Nparticle is a term used in computer graphics to refer to a particle system designed to handle large numbers of small particles in dynamic simulations. The most common reference is the nParticle system implemented in SideFX Houdini, a node-based 3D animation and visual effects package. The nParticle system provides a flexible framework for simulating thousands to millions of particles with per-particle attributes such as position, velocity, age, color, and size. Particles can be emitted from sources, influenced by forces (gravity, wind, drag, turbulence), and affected by collisions with geometry or volumes. They can be driven by fields or attractors and rendered as sprites, metaballs, or point-based primitives, enabling effects like dust, embers, snow, rain, spray, and debris.

The typical workflow involves creating a particle source, applying forces or fields, enabling collisions with scene geometry, and connecting to a solver or dynamics network to update attributes over time. Integration with rendering and shading workflows allows per-particle materials and instancing for efficient rendering of large particle counts.

Beyond Houdini, the term nparticle may be used in broader discussions of N-particle or N-body problems in physics and computational science, where the focus is on the collective dynamics arising from interactions among N particles. In those contexts, nparticle emphasizes the scale and interaction complexity of the system rather than a specific software implementation.