Particles vs ParticleSystem in three.js

Question

I'm struggling with a visualization I'm working on that involves a stream of repeated images. I have it working with a single sprite with a ParticleSystem, but I can only apply a single material to the system. Since I want to choose between textures I tried creating a pool of Particle objects so that I could choose the materials individually, but I can't get an individual Particle to show up with the WebGL renderer.

This is my first foray into WebGL/Three.js, so I'm probably doing something bone-headed, but I thought it would be worth asking what the proper way to go about this is. I'm seeing three possibilities:

• I'm using Particle wrong (initializing with a mapped material, adding to the scene, setting position) and I need to fix what I'm doing.
• I need a ParticleSystem for each sprite I want to display.
• What I'm doing doesn't fit into particles at all and I really should be using another object type.

All the examples I see using the canvas renderer use Particle directly, but I can't find an example using the WebGL renderer that doesn't use ParticleSystem. Any hints?

Answer 1

Ok, I am going from what I have read elsewhere on this github issues page. You should start by reading it. It seems that the Particle is simply for the Canvas Renderer, and it will become Sprite in a further edition of Three.JS. ParticleSystem, however is not going to fulfill your needs either it seems. I don't think these classes are going to help you accomplish this in WebGL in 3D. Depending on what you are doing you might be better off with the CanvasRenderer anyway. ParticleSystem will only allow you to apply a single material which will serve as the material for each particle in the system as you suggested.