Galaxy Spiral
A procedurally generated spiral galaxy rendered as a real WebGL point cloud, with thousands of stars sweeping along branching arms around a glowing two-tone core. Scroll to zoom and drag to orbit right into the disc.
Build a self-contained, performant Canvas 2D visual effect in a single React + TypeScript component.
Effect: "Galaxy Spiral".
Description: A procedurally generated spiral galaxy rendered as a real WebGL point cloud, with thousands of stars sweeping along branching arms around a glowing two-tone core. Scroll to zoom and drag to orbit right into the disc.
Current settings: stars = 12000, particle shape = Points, shape size = 1, arms = 4, spin speed = 1, spread = 0.4, color = Dual, hue = 260, second hue = 30.
Tags: 3d, webgl, three.js, r3f, particles, pointer.
Requirements:
- Use requestAnimationFrame with a delta-time (dt) step, clamped to avoid jumps on tab switches.
- Render crisply: fully clear the canvas every frame (clearRect). Do NOT fake motion blur by painting a translucent background each frame, because that causes permanent 8-bit "ghost" burn-in. If you want trails, store each particle's recent positions and draw them as an explicit fading tail.
- If many short-lived particles are spawned, use an object pool (pre-allocate, reuse, swap-remove on death) to avoid GC pauses.
- Scale the backing store by devicePixelRatio (cap ~2) and handle resize.
- Pause when the tab is hidden or the canvas is off-screen; respect prefers-reduced-motion.
- Expose the listed settings as adjustable props/controls.