I have a Disney World place and I am trying to add in Christmas lights to the castle to do a Christmas update. Far and away the best looking thing that I have tried is using particles to create the christmas lights. Basically, I just have a bunch of particle emitters where they need to be to create the effect and then I set the ParticleEmitter TimeScale to 0 to make them stay in place as a Christmas light would. I have attached below a picture of what it looks like.
As you may guess, there are A LOT of particles that need to be generated around the castle in order to fully light it up and Roblox has a particle limit. Is there any way to get around the particle limit in order to use this method to light up the castle or does anyone have a suggestion for another method? Iâve tried individually placing parts to act as light bulbs, but this does not look nearly as good as the twinkle effect or brightness you get from the particles that make it look so realistic.
Iâd try making 5 (or however many) MeshParts for all the lights. Split 1/5th of the âbulbsâ into each MeshPart, then create a random pattern for each of the 5 MeshParts which changes their Material from SmoothPlastic to Neon.
Each bulb could be a 4 triangle polygon, meaning each of the 4 faces is 1 tri. Put 1000 bulbs together in one MeshPart and youâd only have 4000 tris in each Mesh. If you make 5 separate Meshes thatâd only be 20000 total tris for 5000 light bulbs.
When the Material is Neon each MeshPart bulb will glow, and if itâs SmoothPlastic itâll just be white. This would keep them twinkling more than if you just made them completely Transparent, and remember that partially Transparent Parts cause more rendering lag than Transparency 0 or 1 Parts.
Thatâs kind of what I tried with parts originally, except it was just a .2,.2,.2 part that was neon instead of a neon âbulbâ mesh. It would work, but doesnât look nearly as good as the particle effect I figured out.
But you were worried about lag. My suggestion wasnât to make each Part into a separate light, I said make 5 (or more) MeshParts, each one containing a whole bunch of bulb pyramids placed randomly all over where you need lights on your build.
If you switch one of these MeshParts from SmoothPlastic to Neon it would âflashâ 1/5th of all your bulbs.
If you randomly switch all of the 5 MeshParts back and forth from SmoothPlastic to Neon youâd probably get a decent light show without the lag.
