Making a specific 3d shape made of particles

Beginners
1

good day friends,
say I create a SOP, 3d rectangular box.

And now I want to have that very shape but made of tiny instanced particles.

Those instanced particles could be of course themselves tiny boxes or circles or points or etc.

But the question is how to make them form a specific shape in 3d space. I would then use GLSL to play with the consistency of the shape and the dynamics of those particles, but to begin with I need to understand how to form a specific 3d shape with particles

thank you for your help :slight_smile:

2

boxparticles.toe (5.8 KB)

I have seen that as in this attached .toe, I can link a particle sop to a sop shape, and with a few more bits the particles take the shape of the sop. However, this seems to work quite well with a sphere, but when I try to apply it to a long narrow rectangular box, the particles don’t fill the shape and only occupy part of it.
How can I fill the shape or at least its entire perimeter and faces with the particles?

and how could I do this with a compute shader and instances rather than with the particle sop, that would give me more freedom to experiment

thank you :slight_smile:

3

computeshader-shape.13.toe (7.0 KB)

this is a much better example of what I need to do;
as you can see in this .toe I generate a square shape with a compute shader, a flat square shape,

how should I change this .toe to generate a rectangular shape that is also not flat, that has volume and depth

thank you :slight_smile:

4

boxparticlesnew.17.toe (7.9 KB)

In this new attempt, I can make a rectangular 3D shape with instanced particles and it works, but my challenges now are:

a) most importantly, I need to map a texture on top of the shape, so that the texture makes sense in terms of the image that im using for it, as you can see in the .toe file, the problem is that the texture gets mapped incorrectly and gets broken down and applied in a way in which the image is not properly applied, how can I make that work?

b) the second thing, in the .toe, below at the bottom you will see a computer shader GLSL network not being used at the moment; I would love to involve a computer shader node within the top solution so that I can manipulate the particles with glsl coding, how can I mix both things in there?

thank you so much :slight_smile:

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