If I say particles, you say?

[Henry00]

I was wondering, I could implent some particles using opengl, but it would be cool to see them fill up a room, for example sand, and when player walks through them he leaves a track of sand, would this be possible with newton? Low performance physicial entities that will keep the game fast?
The biggest problem would be collision with world, and since newton has this brilliant fast TreeCollision, combining them would be brilliant!

Thanks for any help!

[JoeJ]

There's an interesting voxel engine capable of that:
http://www.atomontage.com/?id=dev_blog
Voxels, stored in sparse octree are much faster to render because sorting and LOD is build in.

If you want to use real particles be sure they would eat all GPU time, for collisions distance fields seem to be the best approach, see

http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/category/particles/

for example.

But if you really, really need trails in sand i'd just use a 2D height map.
However, you'll get busy enough by adding lighting to your engine

[surp]

However, you'll get busy enough by adding lighting to your engine

How dare you... what do you think i've been trying to do.... impossible....