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Wildfire Spread Through a Forest

A procedural simulation of a wildfire spreading through a forest of instanced trees. Ignition starts at the center and propagates outward tree-to-tree, biased by a configurable wind direction, while burning trees emit rising embers and smoke and shift color from green to fire-orange to charred black.

Trees are drawn as two InstancedMesh objects (trunks and foliage) with a per-instance burn state updated each frame. Embers and smoke are separate additive-blended THREE.Points particle systems driven by per-particle velocity and lifetime arrays, recycled via a ring-buffer cursor.

• 260 instanced trees, each with independent burn progress and color lerp (green → orange → burnt)
• Fire spread is a cellular/graph process: each burning tree rolls a distance-based ignition chance against its neighbors every ~0.4s
• Wind direction & strength bias which downwind trees catch fire first, and push ember/smoke drift
• Up to thousands of ember particles use additive blending with a radial-gradient canvas texture for glow
• Smoke is a separate soft, semi-transparent particle layer that can be toggled on/off live