Pyramid rising majestically out of the sand - Phase II

Many thanks for the help from the forum in helping me to get Phase 1 solved successfully, and the Pyramid now does rise wonderfully up out of the sand, smoothly, and returns beneath the sand, again smoothly, on command.

The second Phase of this project is to add a falling sand effect. I am sure you can imagine as a huge pyramid rises up out of the sand there is a lot of sand cascading down its sides, which would continue but reduce in volume to zero over a few seconds after the pyramid has fully emerged.

To produce the falling sand effect am I looking at getting involved in the particle commands here (another area I have not explored yet)? Or are there other alternatives for creating such an effect?

TIA for any suggestions on the best approach to try.

Vi

Oh yeah, those things make a terrible mess! They positively ruined the lawn last year, and in the end I had to hire a guy to spray for them.

One thing I did notice during the infestation was that there wasn't so much dropping from the top, but the granules tended to mound up around the sides and fall over themselves. Maybe some kind of sphere sections with animated textures could help duplicate that, along with the particle dust? Or, scratch that and just have some biggish cloudy particle stuff happening down there, maybe be more fun than a big lump of sand?

I think you're on the right track with the particle idea. It seems to be the only way to go.


http://www.secondscripter.com/

since you'd want to localize the sand to the sides of the pyramid itself, you might look at how waterfalls are done as another options.

Possibly by adding a transparent layer around the pyramid and finding some sand textures that you could animate along the surface of the pyramid.

Might even be able to do that in conjunction with particles.

This is proving trickier than I ever imagined.

The animated texture approach needs to be done from scratch, as the nature of falling sand is that it is voluminous at first, then reduces and finally stops. Making a sand texture that emulates this is a job for photoshop I think, and I am no expert (or novice for that matter) when it comes to photoshop. Unfortunately all sand textures I have found so far are all uniform.

Particles, even when glow is turned off, still exhibit a tiny amount of glow (in my examples, anyway). I cannot get an effect where the particles really do look like sand. The other thing is, the particles all seem to emanate from a point, where for the correct effect they need to drop vertically down from along a long edge, and I cannot find how to do that either.

Starting to get despondent

Vi

Just a suggestion which I'm not sure would actually work, but here goes, can you use a texture changer so that the sand fades as it goes through the routine? you could probably use the same sand texture with varying levels of alpha transparency?

Or maybe using the animation script, starting with full sand and fading out to no sand?

What about a temprez on a physics enabled set of prims? That would fall somewhat naturally, and if its temp then it would just die on it's own. You can pack an unlinked set of prims into a rezzer, and it will rez the whole thing. Either way this may get laggy. But if you want it to fall, I would use physics. Also try Outy's particles, they are hugely modifiable. i would go for the water set. You can add any texture you want, and the water can use a bunch of directional effects. But yes, particels do cast a glow. And they are chat commanded, independant.

You can use whatever device you are using to trigger the movement, Then call the particles on and off. His water F/X can utilize fades as well. And called on/off. Maybe use a llSleep(_) command in the start command, time the calls with slightly more translucent particles as it goes on.

Or a combination of all of these hints really. Hopefully you have a lot of land to play with to get this to work.

Kind of in line with what Atom is saying, there is a wave particle script in action at the SLurl below, I think this is an effect you could use and it shows it is doable.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Therianation/17/109/23