The kind of particles I use are ‘Instance Object’ of an icosphere. I want them all to be one mesh that I can edit. But I can’t get it to work. Everything goes crazy in a big way.
The particles I want to convert just disappears when I do that. ‘Convert’ in the modifier panel (of the particle system modifier) of the emitter object creates one separate “object” (not really a real object but more a weird ghost object that is unusable and uneditable and that just messes everything up if you try to do anything with it) out of each and every particle, which makes the collections panel a bit crowded when the particle numbers are up in the thousands. I guess that the created particles are some kind of instanced objects, they seem to contain linked mesh data (note that I don’t understand how mesh data are handled in Blender) to each other, which creates a hellish and chaotic array with millions of of particles if joined.
At this point I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
I am thankful for any advice to resolve this problem, and also on how to get a better understanding on how particle systems and mesh instances work.
Edit: I downloaded 2.79 and got the same result. It’s not a 2.8 issue, but me not knowing how to do this.
Edit 2: I have tried a lot of stuff and finally got it to work. Just remember to delete the instance mesh and Blender won’t have a stroke. A way to creating a mesh from object instance particles:
1 With particle system emitter object selected: Ctrl-a (Apply menu) ‘Make instances real’
2 Delete the original emitter mesh and (very importantly!*) the particle system’s instanced object.
3 Select the generated particle instances from ‘1’, then shift select one of them so one of them turns yellow/active
4 Ctrl-j (join)
5 Done
*If the instance object is not deleted the particle system will turn into a nightmarish clusterfuck and thousands will turn into millions and millions into billions and Blender might stop responding.