Resolved Shape Request: Picture Frame

So there's already a Circle Shape, which is the 2D equivalent of the Sphere. But there's not yet a Square Shape, as the 2D equivalent of the AABox.

I know there are workarounds, like using 4 line emitters, or emitting from a square object, but having a Square Shape would be handy for common scenarios like:

1. Emitting from outside the gameview, and then animating into the game view (No popping!!!)
2. Emitting from the outer edge of a rect (sparkly buttons), or in a sequence around the perimeter

If I'm missing an obvious way to do those with the current shapes, please educate me.

 

Tried that, and no. The particles still spawn across the full surface, rather than just at the edges. So there's no way to get the clean outline of the box.

 

Square "Outline" might be a better descriptor than square

 

Here's a pretty generic graph setup to spawn a picture frame with parameters for width, height, and thickness of the border

 

Wowzer! I use operator subgraphs a lot, but didn't know that I could subgraph blocks and systems and all the combinations. Awesome!

Here's the doc reference I found on it

Here's my shiny, compact Window Box Block


The right-click to create was super easy, with a couple of notes:

• My first attempt failed since I selected a group of operators rather than the individual operators which is required to be included in the sub-graph. Being able to add groups would be nice.
• There's no undo. That's fine, but without warning and without backing up a graph first, that could lead to lost progress, all because you mis-clicked a node. Or later decided a subgraph wasn't the way to go.

Overall, great feature!

 

OK. Ctrl-Z works great for Undo, as you say. That's great, and all I need.

I had right-clicked the new subblock graph, and didn't see any option to Undo. There's options like "Disconnect All" but nothing similar to the opposite of "Convert to Subgraph Block", something like "Expand/Expose/Explode/Undo Subgraph Block". That is probably harder to implement than it is valuable to have.

While I marked this thread "Resolved" as I now have a basic workaround, I still want the Picture Frame feature that I submitted to the list. Reasons include:

1. Picture frames are a really common scenario for both the screen and UI elements
2. This workaround technique has a very spotty distribution of spawned particles in the desired space, since it's the edges of another space that IS evenly distributed.
3. A dedicated shape could include features from other shapes, like Set Position: Sequential to spawn around the edge/perimeter of the shape, or Arc to control sections of the shape (like the top right corner of the picture frame), or a Position Mode that flips whether particles initially spawn/move into or away from the picture frame. Lots of fun possibilities to build upon.

Thanks for all the help!