In the past few days, I have been experimenting with creating patterns using the particle system in Unity Engine. Here are some of the examples of the shapes I came up with.

So in this post I am going to go through how to achieve something like this using Unity 3D. I am not going to go to the specifics regarding how I am achieving each effect, but more like the general idea on how to get there.

To start off we need a setup where we can draw on a canvas of some sort. There are many different ways to do this, the easiest way in Unity would be to set up an Orthogonal camera, and set its Clear Flag to Don’t Clear. In a standard application, you would want to draw everything on each frame from scratch, that’s why you would clear the background with a solid color each frame. This is not ideal for our use case, because we want to draw with objects, as if they are pens we are drawing with on a piece of paper. So the trail of the particle movement must remain on the canvas.

Once you setup the camera to not clear its buffer, you could easily create something like this. Notice how the particles are spawning randomly and building a texture overtime.