It might be a little heavy of a solution, but could you make your
electrons into particle emitters to leave a tail behind.  Make the
particles small, a reasonable count, and a short life span and you
might get the effect you are looking for.

On Apr 18, 10:02 pm, Vic <[email protected]> wrote:
> My first aw3d project
> (http://www.vicware.com/flash/Flyover/FlyOver03.html) was
> functionality-wise a total failure but a very good education as far as
> the potential and usage of aw3d.
>
> I just did my next project -http://www.vicware.com/flash/Atom/atom02.html
> which I thought would be much easier than the first one. It wasn't as
> easy
> as I thought it would be, although it looks pretty simple.
>
> Just a few notes, if anyone is interested:
>
> If you look at the demo you'll see the atom - you can spin it, and add
> and
> remove, with toggles, the parts to the atom (electron shell, nucleus,
> etc).
> I even have the protons and neutrons in the nucleus randomly jiggling,
> as
> often depicted in film and video. The element is fictional
> (Vicwarium), but
> theoretically I could make any real or made-up atom I want now that I
> have this set up. (btw, note that at this scale, the nucleus would be
> more
> or less invisibly tiny, if this was supposed to be a completely
> realistic
> depiction of an atom. But it needed to be more interesting and I think
> it's more educational this way).
>
> As far as aw3d goes, I still had problems dealing with 3d containers
> within
> other containers, and children of children, and so forth. One thing I
> can pass
> on to other new users, is that you basically want to create the
> broadest or
> most-outer container for a series of other objects early in your
> assembly
> of objects, which terribly confused me until I got it. Even with all
> the posts
> and the aw3d tutorials I read.
>
> In this way, you can assign pivot points of separate elements to the
> previously
> declared main container, and in this way everything stays centrally
> pivoted. I
> was working it the other way around - it seemed logical to load a
> bunch of
> objects and then try to line them up within the main container last.
> That was
> wrong. It cost me a lot of time because nothing would ever pivot
> correctly.
> I'm sure it was in the docs or in all the posts I've read, but I
> didn't get it
> until I figured it out.
>
> Another subject is owncanvas. If you look at the electron orbits they
> appear
> behind and in front of the nucleus perfectly as everything rotates.
> But I also
> wanted to soften the orbits a little and maybe give them a slight
> glow. You
> can't assign any filters to an object without owncanvas'ing it. But
> when I
> owncanvas'ed the orbit rings, I then lost proper z-sorting of the
> rings and
> nucleus and it all fell apart. I tried all kinds of pushfronts and
> pushbacks
> too. But the only sure thing was to leave owncanvas false. Strangely
> enough, the moving electrons have a glow filter (owncanvas true) and
> they properly hide behind and pass in front of the nucleus.
>
> One other thing - I wanted to have the electrons leave a motion-blur
> smear
> or tail lagging behind the as the electrons orbited. The electrons do
> have
> a glow filter, and I tried a number of different things, but couldn't
> get it
> to work properly. I have some ideas on how to accomplish this, but I
> don't think I know what to do. Does anyone have any suggestions or
> tricks on how to get an object or container to do this?
>
> Thanks for your time.
> Vic
>
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