particles
references
recommended
William T. Reeves. 1983. Particle systems—a technique for modeling a class of fuzzy objects. In Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques (SIGGRAPH '83), Peter P. Tanner (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 359-375. (ncsu)
Craig W. Reynolds. 1987. Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph. 21, 4 (August 1987), 25-34. See Craig's related site. (ncsu)
Akenine-Moller, T., Haines, E., & Hoffman, N. (2018). Billboarding & particles. In sections 13.6 & 13.8 in Real-Time Rendering. AK Peters/CRC Press. (ncsu)
optional
T. Forsyth. 2001. Imposters: adding clutter. In M. DeLoura (ed.), Game Programming Gems 2, Charles River Media, 488-496.
G. Schaufler and W. Stuerzlinger. 1996. A three dimensional image cache for virtual reality. Computer Graphics Forum, 15, 3, 227-236.
sites and demos
sites
The particle systems wiki page. This includes a reference to David MacAllister's particle API, that seems to be down.
J. van der Burg. 2000. Building an Advanced Particle System. Gamasutra, June 23. Matching code.
L. Latta. 2004. Building a million particle system. Gamasutra, July.
Particles in Blender.
The flocking wiki page. Includes links to several demos.
Chrome particles experiments.
demos
J. Molofee. Particle engine using triangle strips. An opengl demo at Nehe.
The Flint particle system, based in Flash (not working).
Reallusion, iclone & troyano, dynamic particles. A webgl, three.js demo.
Vectorstream, a chrome particles experiment.
Chris Wellons. Webgl particle physics. A webgl demo.
gpfault particles with billboards.
proton's flare sim (missing). Here is the 2d example site, though. And here are the 3d examples.
haxiomic fluid sim (not working).
V. Garreau. 2D API demo.
Jarrodo sandbox.