Tutorial - Body Dust / Sparkles

[Nix Starlight]

Does anyone have an idea of how body dust is made exactly? Similar to this: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Cynful-Glitter-Body-Dust-Check-description-for-all-supported-Sizes/14560358

 

I have an idea that the mesh is a bunch of dots, and that the sparkles themselves are animated dot textures moving across the mesh, making it appear to be flashing? I am unsure exactly. I have an idea of making sparkles that can have alphas for the hands, arms, feet, legs, etc respectively so you can choose which parts are animating? I have no idea how to go about this. 

[Tazzie Tuque]

I would be interested in figuring this out too.  I have tried several methods but none work the way I want them to.

 

[Quistess Alpha]

11 minutes ago, Nix Starlight said:

I have an idea that the mesh is a bunch of dots, and that the sparkles themselves are animated dot textures moving across the mesh, making it appear to be flashing? I am unsure exactly. I have an idea of making sparkles that can have alphas for the hands, arms, feet, legs, etc respectively so you can choose which parts are animating? I have no idea how to go about this. 

the mesh is a bunch of dots, basically very low poly spheres. The texture is something like a vertical white stripe with transparency on either side. the UV map is such that most of the dots take up a very small portion of the image, as the stripe is moved left to right, the white part moves onto the dot and it becomes glowey (because the glow setting is set really high) then as the white part moves past the dot it becomes transparent and not glowey looking again. A single mesh object cna have up to 8 faces that could have different textures (moving at different speeds) and different parts of the same texture could be used for different dots.