A guide for adding short-lived visual effects, such as smoke, spray, splashes, or a vehicle wake, to a PlayCanvas app, a browser-based 3D game and application engine.

It helps choose between PlayCanvas particles and custom meshes, reuse official examples or scripts, position and layer effects, manage their lifetime, and verify how they look in the scene.

It helps avoid effects that are placed incorrectly, use the wrong rendering approach, or remain in the scene after they should disappear. It also includes checks for runtime and console problems.

add-effects — Skill for Claude Code by playcanvas/skills

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add playcanvas/skills --skill add-effects

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/playcanvas/skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install playcanvas, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/playcanvas/skills/add-effects/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/playcanvas/skills/add-effects)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/playcanvas/skills/add-effects"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/playcanvas/skills/add-effects/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/playcanvas/skills/add-effects"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/playcanvas/skills/add-effects.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 331 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00030	$0.00331
Opus 5.5	$0.00012	$0.00132
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00006	$0.00066
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00033

Measured 24d ago against content hash dfdc72e5143f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

add-effects scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 24d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to add-effects — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/add-effects/SKILL.md · 31 lines

What it actually says

Effects

Pick the Engine building block first, then adapt its closest official example with find-examples:

Particle systems: the particlesystem component (graphics/particles-* examples).
Custom shading on existing surfaces: StandardMaterial chunk overrides (override-shader-chunks), or a ShaderMaterial when the effect needs its own shader pair.
Procedural or per-frame geometry: a runtime-updated Mesh on a render component (graphics/mesh-* examples), or WideLineRenderer for lines with width.
Full-screen effects: CameraFrame (light-scene).
Gaussian splat effects: the shipped gsplat scripts (reuse-scripts).

Engine gotchas

CurveSet takes one key array per channel. A flattened array type-checks, then fails at texture upload.
Create emitters and meshes at load and reuse them. Fire an emitter with reset() then play(); one-shots use loop: false.
The first use of a shader stalls a frame. Render each effect once behind a loading screen.
Animate values with setParameter, not a per-frame material.update().
A lit material on a custom mesh needs normals; otherwise use an unlit material.

Trigger each effect through the app's real inputs, and confirm repeated triggers keep entity counts stable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

24d ago Changed · -62 lines · -9 tokens per session dfdc72e5143f
1mo ago Changed · +11 lines 2c0a2b55830b
1mo ago First seen · 82 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A 8f76d8bcbfe1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

add-effects is a skill published in the GitHub repository playcanvas/skills (30 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 331 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to add-effects, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Claude Code Creative and media Game development agent-skills ai-agents claude coding-agents playcanvas

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