So, I've decided to take on the task of attempting to make the player have wings made of smoke particles. I am planning on hard-coding all the points of the particles I want to show with their (x, y) positions relative to the center of the back, but then I'm going to need to rotate them about the z-axis (I think...) which I'm not quite sure how to do. I've been reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_matrix which is on Rotation Matrices and I think it may have something to do with this, but I'm not quite sure. I've only completed through Calc I and haven't taken Linear Algebra yet which is the class where I think I would learn this kinda thing. Should I just give up on this idea?

 

Also, I'm wondering how you get the player's body rotation. I know you can get the rotation of the head (player.getRotationYawHead()), but the rotation of the head and the body are often different.

 

I didn't really want to use OpenGL for this sort of thing, because I think it would look really cool to have the wings made of smoke particles, but if there's a way to accomplish the same sort of effect using OpenGL, I'm interested in hearing about it. Thank you for your help.

OpenGL is the rendering engine of Minecraft any type of rendering you do eventually traces back to OpenGL. There is a simple way to do rotations GLStateManager.rotate (angle, x, y, x). Honestly the easiest way would be to guess and check until you get the rotations correct, and i believe you can get the players rotation, but you may need reflection.