Have idea.. need a helpful nudge

Good day.

I'm not the most talented builder but have an idea that I'd like to tinker with. I've been playing with a particle tool but it's not doing exactly what I have pictured.. which makes me wonder if it's something I can do with prims.

Can particles be "trapped" inside a prim and have an eternal lifespan?

Cheers
Daisy

Unfortunately, no. Particles have their own special rules and don't support either of these.

You can create physical prims that will bounce around an enclosed space to get a similar effect. But that takes a lot of server-side processing and might have a noticeable impact on sim performance.

Thanks Omei! I guess I'll see what other solution I can come up with, may try the prims and see how much it slows things down, the items is very small.

I would strongly suggest you *not* try having physical prims bouncing around in an enclosed space. With the current physics engine, it would have a good chance of crashing the sim. Maybe once Havok 4 comes out, but for now it's playing with fire.

thanks.

/me stumbles back to the drawing board

If your item is small, I would think you could get the effect you want with animated textures.

Daisy, I wouldn't be quite so pessimistic. I once did a kinetic sculpture that had about 2 dozen spheres floating around in a closed space, and its impact on sim performance was minimal. But keep in mind I was using pure spheres that had a simple geometry and they were moving very slowly, so the collision rate was not high.

Thanks Sylvia. I'll definitely look into that as an option too. I haven't seen animated textures, but I think I'm going looking for some tonight.

Omei, that sounds simliar, mine would be very small flat boxes, nothing to intricate. So that leaves me with.. how do I make physical prims? Perhaps I should go look at the build menu first, eh? Thanks for all your help.

Particles might work for you. Generate them at the exact middle of the object, and have them disappear very quicklly so they *seem* to stay inside. They won't bounce around, but they will still seem to be inside.

You could also have two or more particle generators. Suppose one is on the left and shoots particles to the right, and another is on the right, and shoots particles to the left. This might create the isslusion of particles bouncing from left to right and back again.

So many ideas! Thanks guys/girls! I'm so glad I posted my question! If I ever make what I'm picturing, I'll give ya all a copy to say thanks.

Yes, rate of collision plays a big part. So does how confined the prims are. Note I didn't say impossible, just risky. I once had a single physical acorn dropped by a cute squirrel bring one of my sims to it's knees, because it fell in a crack between to prims of a walkway. So even the most innocuous item can become an instrument of destruction in the right circumstances. Just be careful.

I have done it in a skybox at max rez height and it was fine (expect the fact that I had to clean up boxes across the sim, lol) Make sure they are 1% of the size of object they are in. That does mean that they will be incredibly small if in a 1m cube. Beside that I agree. This is heavily server intensive and just be done when you are alone on a sim.

...and I thought you were a good christian boy!