Make prim appear as light/particles?

I have a prim that is a rotating ring. I've set the material to light, but Im still not getting the effect I want.

I'm looking to have the ring look like a rotating ring of light particles, with a kind of diffuse glow to it. Any recommendations?

You could try making a single torus with a glittery, starfield-like texture that's mostly transparent. That's the simplest approach. You won't need extra prims, and I'm assuming you already have a script rotating the object itself.

If you want separate particles drifting from the ring, you can set that up a couple different ways. One would be to attach several prims that look like sparkles to the ring, and make the ring itself clear. Rotating the ring will spin the whole object. Or you could make the attached prims clear as well and have them give off stationary particles with the PSYS_PART_FOLLOW_SRC_MASK bit set, so they follow the nodes as they rotate. These will both take a lot of prims -- pretty much one per sparkle -- but they'll give you smooth circular motion. Something else you could do is have each of the nodes send a short stream of particles to the next, and DON'T rotate the ring. This will take fewer prims, but the sparkles won't travel in a perfect circle. They'll flow in an octagon shape, or a decagon, or whatever, depending on how many nodes you place around the ring.

Create a texture in your image editor with a sprinkling of light glows in the alpha channel.
Then apply them to several rings of slightly different diameter. If you're not sure how to do this, theres some tutorials in the design and textures section of the forum.

Drop the 'anim smooth' script into the rings. This script animates the texture without actually rotating the prim.

Then adjust their speed so they don't all move at the same rate. The speed of animation is dictated by a simple number in the script. You should be able to get it by messing around with it a little.