Seperate Particles from Mesh Objects
Particle emitters should be their own objects with volume definitions ( box, cone, line, circle, etc ) with the option to have a list of mesh objects to emit from. Not the other way around imo.
I find it strange that it's tightly coupled to mesh objects instead. But perhaps I'm missing the intent of the design, but as it currently is, it feels a counter intuitive. A particle system shouldn't be a modifier. Instead modifiers for mesh objects should control some values of a particle system object to assume some uniqueness where multiple mesh objects are assigned to one particle system object.
I think if particle systems are their own object, they could also have their own modifiers ( scaling, velocity, randomness, whatever) to build more complex emitters. Complexity of child particles and trail could also be streamlined as you're directly dealing with a particle system and not a mesh object. Unity and Unreal aren't 3d modeling tools but their particle systems seem to give more artistic control. Not that blenders particles aren't powerful, they are just weirdly placed.
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This may be the way it's done in the near future. Nodes based particles are being worked on right now and I'm sure there will be many ways to define sources.
Makes sense. But I wonder if having particle systems attached directly to meshes isn't more intuitive when you have an emitter object that also participates in collisions and appears in render. For example a bouncing ball that's emitting particles. Wouldn't your proposal add unecessary complexity, in that example?
But yeah, node-based particles is probably gonna solve a lot of these issues.
@hyuri.pimentel:
You would select the ball in the particle emitter then. Not sure how it's more complex. Currently particle systems are hidden under a modifier. Not exactly the first place I would look for.
Eitherway there needs to be a lot more control to the particle systems. Haven't heard much about the node based system since that video few months back. Would be nice if bf updated everyone more on those things.
It may be worth it to create a few mock-ups that illustrate the workflow that a user may go through using particle objects. For instance, how and where would they define source and volume meshes?
@Jason van Gumster: Particle objects would have their own property panels, like mesh/light/bezier objects do. Having a list of mesh objects there should suffice if mesh volume is selected from a dropdown rather than the primitive volumes which would have their own properties respectively.
Particle Objects are the emitters unless a mesh volume is specified. I'm not sure what you mean by source?
@sidartalei: This is why a visual mock-up is helpful. I meant source as emitter... slight slip of terminology. So there would be a drop-down to pick objects and a listbox to show the objects that are being used. Is that correct?
@Jason van Gumster:
A drop down would be used to select a volume shape and in the case of mesh an additional listbox is shown for all meshes used to emit from.
I have to get back to this when i have time, ill create a mockup whenever i can.
Also please get rid of chimpin_75. He is an absolute drag. He is tainting this post as well.