No, don’t apologize, your reply is super helpful. Your examples suggest a completely different approach that I hadn’t considered because I don’t know enough about it. I read through the code for the 100,000 spheres and your p5 examples. For my situation I’ll probably need to explicitly compute the geometry on the CPU and pass the positions with the float point framebuffers. I need to experiment with this to learn more about it. I think it might work for what I need to accomplish.
I’m also curious if I can write code in Processing to do similar work with frame buffers? Not through the API, but through the PGL class through with Processing interacts with OpenGL.