Particle Question: Falling 'Ring' of Particles?

I have tinkered muchly and tried every variation I can come up with using my rather limited knowledge but as yet I have not managed to create the particle effect I'm hoping for...

That is, a ring of particles that appear at a half meter radius from the source and fall straight down. I can get a satisfactory 'ring' (not perfect, but good) but I've yet to deduce how to get the particles to fall straight downwards from their origin points.

The intended effect is a short-lived 'shower' of particles in a circle around an avatar.

Thanks in advance for any advice! Contact me in-world or reply here. Thanks! ^_^

Sounds like you're close...

Try using the PSYS_SRC_ACCEL parameter... set it to something like <0,0,- 0.1>

and then set your PSYS_SRC_START_SPEED_MIN (and _MAX) to 0.01 =)

Thanks Jopsy! I'll give that a shot. I was all over the Particle Labo today trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. ^_^;;;

Worked absomalutely fantastically, Jopsy! Thank you so much! Looks fantastic with your favorite Flare particle, btw. ^_^

Help! I've got a cylindrical prim (in default orientation) with a circle of falling particles as described here. I've used ANGLE_CONE and PI_BY_TWO/PI_BY_TWO to get the ring appearing perpendicular to the Z axis of the cylinder, all good so far...

Can i somehow have the ring as a half-circle in the same orientation, without spinning the emitter prim? I can get the half-ring to appear vertically, in the wrong orientation, but for the life of me i can't figure out how to get it to stay perpendicular to the Z axis of its emitter.

It feels like this should be obvious and easy but my brain's numb and i'm getting nowhere - help?

Thnx in advance

I confess that when I had to tackle a similar problem, I ended up firing the emission from an alpha prim positioned in the necessary orientation and then tacked onto the main prim.

Kinda felt like I was cheating, tbh, but it worked

It's a good idea and i'd considered it but to complicate matters the cylinder is a door and has to spin open and i'd have to sync the rotation of the alpha-prim too...gets way too complicated..

I stared at it last night until i realised a simple solution - swap the cylinder for a tube! The tube's natural orientation is perpendicular to a cylinder's so that means particles emitted on the previously wrong axis are now on the correct axis!

That solved my particle problem - and gave me another one; my current door script won't co-operate and spin the door on the different axis...

Now that's thinking outside the box. er, um... I mean clever idea! =)

If you have mod access to the door script look for the rotation bits, you may be able to simply swap < x, y, Z > .. and re-order them to be either < Z, y, x > or < x, Z, y >, whichever works out for you. =)

(haven't had my coffee today, sorry of that's obtuse)

I saw the problem with the door script eventually - it was my fault, making a silly syntax error - my bracket was ( when it should have been < or maybe vice versa...

All working now, switching to tube instead of a cylinder had other design benefits too, funny how it works out that way sometimes if you just stick with it...

Thnx for responses!

hey Jopsy, haven't seen you down in the trenches in a while =)

Hiya Void!

I'm still in the trenches... just different ones lately.

Secret new project in the works. Shhh.