Hmm, right. Now that I’ve looked at the actual code it seems you’re right. For the longest time I just assumed it had the option for it but I never needed it so I never checked. I’m fairly sure I’ve seen multiple people say it had the implementation for it and figured it was something like setMesh(yourcustommesh).
Looking at the code for the emitter it does somewhat look like it could be hacked to use custom meshes but I don’t know what kind of pitfalls that may have. It could just stop working completely.
I suppose you have four options now:
- copy the code for the particleemitter and try to modify it
- use the code for the tonegod emitter (that may or may not support it) which I personally cannot find anywhere at all
- limit yourself to opengl 3.1 and upwards (pretty much all PCs in existence except everything apple because they’re pricks) and use instancing as it’s sort of simmilar to a particle emitter and would probably work pretty well for this case
- record the frames of a spinning icosphere and put them into the stock particle emitter as an animation on a quad
The quad animation is probably the simplest but will also likely look the worst of them all since the spheres are so close together. It just won’t look right since they’re not really spheres and cannot actually clip into one another.
If you do decide to go the instancing way, make sure to read at least from the linked post until the end of the thread since there are some problems and solutions discussed about the code I linked to.