Sami Glow: Glowing Particle Typography

"Rendering a dynamic particle tunnel animation to reveal custom typography"

I built this animation to test particle systems and how they interact with typography. The idea was simple: create a tunnel of glowing orange spheres that move toward the camera and reveal text as they pass.

The particles are placed in a spiral pattern and animated forward in Z space. As they move, their glow creates light trails that pull your eye toward the center where the text sits.

WHAT I WAS TESTING:

How to position particles in a tunnel shape using math

How glow and light falloff work when many small objects emit light

How camera movement affects the sense of depth in a particle system

The orange spheres are instances of the same geometry, each with a slightly different position and timing. The glow comes from a combination of emissive material and post-processing bloom.

THE TECHNICAL SIDE:

The animation runs in real time using WebGL. Each frame, the particles move forward and reset to the back of the tunnel when they pass the camera. This creates the loop.

The text stays fixed in the center while the particles flow around it. The lighting setup uses a single directional light plus the emissive glow from the particles themselves. I kept the background dark so the orange stands out.

WHAT I LEARNED:

Particle systems are about repetition and variation. Same shape, different position, slight timing offsets. That is what makes them feel alive instead of mechanical.

The glow effect depends on bloom thresholds. Too much bloom and everything washes out. Too little and the particles look flat. Finding that balance took some tweaking.

Built by Samin Sami | Developer & 3D Experimentation