I am evaluating my options regarding exporting particle systems from Maya 2012 to Three.js.
Does anyone know the best way of going about this?
It doesn't appear that any existing exporters have particle system export capability, so I have come up with a couple of alternative approaches:
Convert the particle system to an animated mesh, export using the Black Tower exporter, and display as an animated
PointCloudin threejs. Is this even possible in Maya? How would I go about doing that conversion?Write a custom Maya export script that exports the attributes of a particle system, then write an importer to create a Shader Particle Engine from those attributes.
The first option has the advantage that any complex particle-scene interactions (e.g. particles bouncing off walls, gravity etc) would be included in the animations. The second option would have to have these programmed into the js side, but is likely to be more performant.
Is there a better approach that I haven't thought of? Or existing libraries I haven't been able to find?
