Bioluminescent Plankton

Certain marine dinoflagellates emit brief blue-green flashes through a luciferin-luciferase reaction inside scintillon organelles, most often triggered by mechanical disturbance such as breaking waves, boat wakes or a predator brushing past. This scene reproduces that with a GPU point-sprite system: 6,000 particles are pushed through a trig-based curl-noise flow field in a GLSL vertex shader to mimic drifting currents, while a fragment shader gives each sprite a soft radial glow and a per-particle sine-wave "flash" pulse. Additive blending stacks the overlapping glows into a bloom-like haze, and animated light-shaft planes simulate sunlight filtering down from above.

Particles
6,000
Technique
GPU point-sprite shader
Glow intensity
0 – 3x
Blending
Additive (bloom)
Palette
Teal / Cyan
1.00
1.20
1.00