3D particle engine

You might have a problem with meshes. A particle system implies lots of particles, and that implies lots of meshes, which means that you have to figure out how to avoid one or more draw calls per mesh.

What if I render the meshes to a texture in real time and use this texture in my particle emitter? It's too heavy?

Do you mean software-render them to a texture?

My system uses four vertices per particle sprite, and around 2-100 vertices for each complex mesh particle. The complex mesh particles are used sparingly (no more than 25 at a time) for explosion chunks and such, but they're rendered in the same way as sprites; with visible particles copied to a single vertex buffer and rendered in one go.

edit: "2-100 vertices".. Ha, you can't even build a triangle out of 2 vertices. Make that 8-100.

Yes, it is certainly possible to use meshes as particles.
When people think of particles, they often think of billboards, but this doesn't have to be.

It's possible to use a particle system that supports 3D meshes as particles for things such as debris being emitted from some explosion.

I wouldn't call it a 3D particle system though :) You could call it something like a mesh based particle system.

You can use hardware instancing to draw a lot of the similar debris/particles at the same time. Each having their own unique transform, but sharing the same mesh.

Thanks Kest and Buckshag!

Buckshag, that's exactly what I want to know. Thanks again. I can continue to develop my "mesh based particle system" now. It's really cool this anything-particle-system thing, isn't? :)

Vinícius Fonseca