come up against a wall...suggestions?

Hi all.

I'm currently trying to do a magic circle that "flares" with energy coming off of it up into the air in the shape of the circle and am stumped how to do this without laying out a ton of tiny prims in the shape of the circle and then using particles from each tiny prim.

Are there any other ways to do this that will look good and if so what please?

You can do this with a 1 prim particle system.

Set

PSYS_SRC_PATTERN to PSYS_SRC_PATTERN_ANGLE
PSYS_SRC_BURST_RADIUS to the radius of your circle
PSYS_SRC_ANGLE_BEGIN to PI to give a full circle
PSYS_SRC_ANGLE_END to 0
PSYS_SRC_ACCEL to <0,0,1> apply a forc in the upward directiom adjust as needed for effect

this gives you the basic circle shape, rotate the prim to get the correct direction, and play with the other parameters as need to get the effect you want.

thanks i'll give that a try.

You could also use an animated texture, or even an animated scultpy, if you're good with sculpts.

the look i'm shooting for is energy coming off the page. how would I do that with an animated texture? the end image will be more complex then a simple circle as that was an example to get me started on trying to work this out.

Always open for more suggestions to try

ok i gave this a try with my circle/rune graphic and could not get it to project up from the flat surface, all it did was send an image of the graphic upward but not laying flat. /sigh hard to explain. the particle always rotates the texture image used to face the viewer but i need the particle image to lay flat on a surface. Is there any way to turn off a particle texture from always facing the camera?

I'm not sure how i'd get a stream of energy type of graphic to fit a pattern on a flat surface and have it look like its projecting upwards. For the simple circle i had problems getting that a bit but was much more doable :/

What do you mean by "coming off the page"? Are you making a magic book or something?

In any case, what I meant by using an animated texture is this:

1. Model the shape of the path you want the energy burst to follow, either with a sculpty or a regular prim.

2. Put the image of the energy burst onto an otherwise fully transparent texture. You'll probably want a lot of empty background for this.

3. Apply the texture to the path object, and animate it so the energy appears to flow along the path. Do it well, the path will be completely invisible, most of the time, with the energy burst appearing to erupt out at regular intervals.


With this technique, you can create anything from lighting strikes to orb effects to nova bursts to mushroom clouds, very convincingly. It's similar to how water fixtures and such are typically done in SL, just with different texturing.

I assume that what you want is, for example, some sort of effect rising out of the ground along an irregular path. To use a very odd but hopefully effective analogy, say you have a dog-shaped cookie laying on the ground. If you lay the dog-shaped cookie cutter on top of the cookie, you want the effect to rise vertically, bottom to top, along the path or circumference of the cookie cutter.

Along the lines of Chosen's recommendation, I would do it with an animated texture on a sculptie, perhaps even managing it's glow and speed properties with a script. The difficult part is of course, shaping the sculptie