I’m currently in the final stages of polishing a Mesh Particle Renderer system that will integrate with the existing Unity particle systems and will work as a simple drop in replacement of the Particle Renderer component. The system is highly optimized, supports any material/shader (including lighting and shadows) and supports all features of Unity’s particle system including growth, forces, rotations, the World Particle Collider component, etc.
The Particle Animator component’s color information will not be used in the first version as this would require special shaders utilising vertex colors, but I’ll add the vertex color option in the next version and some sample shaders.
I’ll be submitting the system to the Asset Store shortly and will post an update when it’s available. Thanks.
Thats amazing. I just got one question. Is current mesh particle system not working? Becouse i have tried to get it working and i just could see any mesh spawning.
If you’re referring to the ‘Mesh Particle Emitter’ component built into Unity then it is a different type of system. It is for emitting particles from vertex positions of a given mesh, it does not render meshes as particles like this system does. It does what it is intended to do properly, it’s just not overly useful. If you’re wanting to use meshes as particles then this is the system you’ll want.
Beautiful! This is one of those essential features that has been left out to this point. Thank you for taking the time to implement this, I’ll definitely be one of your customers. Frankly, I’m not sure what Unity wouldn’t be one of your big customers and implement it into the next version release.
Question:
Do you think it’d be possible to add colliders to the meshes? i.e. You could then give projectiles some way to detect an impact… If it was possible it would be useful for shot gun blasts, high rate of fire guns etc, multiple cannon balls fired at once etc… or… you could have say chunks of rock from a blasted cliff face fall into water, the impact then spawning additional particle effects for splashes etc on the fly…
An exploding wall/building is definitely the sort of effect that would benefit from mesh particles being used alongside standard particles. Representing physical chunks of an object that has been blown apart with billboard particles is very difficult, having mesh particles makes it look much better.
I’m currently going through the final stages of polish and testing before I submit it to the store. I’ll be sure to post as soon as it’s available.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I developed it in such as way that it would work with the existing systems exactly how you would expect it to if it was made by the Unity team.
As for collisions, some it would be possible, but not all in the initial version. Unity’s particle colliders can send a message to objects hit so the shotgun blast example would work, but unless I’m mistaken the splash effect would not as the message sent does not include the collision position.
