For a few days I have been trying to figure out a way to make a soul gem emit sparks or look like it has bolts of electricity flowing over its surface for a sustained period of time. I had success with doing this via EffectShaders on actors (using ShockBigFXShader, for instance), so at first I tried to apply an effectShader to the soul gem, but realized that the particle shader doesn't work on non-actor objectReferences.

So now I have been trying to get this to work by placeAtMe()'ing Explosions at the gem's location. This sort of works, but the problem now is that I have no control over the length of explosions like I did with a particle shader, so I have to loop it. I tried looping MG07LightBeamImpactExplosion by re-applying it every 1.5 seconds or so via script, and the sparking effect on this particular explosion is exactly what I'm looking for, but now it looks pretty dumb because in addition to the sparks, there is also a widening circle of explosive blue color that pops out every 1.5 seconds, making it obvious that this is a looping effect, so it doesn't look realistic.

I tried figuring out how to edit out the "explosive" part of the explosion .nif via nifTools, but this seems like a daunting task and all the online advice seems to suggest that editing vanilla animations is either impossible or inordinately time-consuming.

There has got to be a way to achieve this effect right? The only thing I haven't yet tried that I am wondering whether it will work is to make a fake Actor that looks like a soul gem (is this even possible? Haven't messed with actor meshes at all..) and then play a particle shader on it. But I'm hoping there is an easier way to solve this problem.

Thanks in advance!

I'm pretty sure that particle effects such as this are generated from the object's NIF. RU good with Nifskope?

Thanks for the response, though I'm terrible with nifSkope.

Luckily, I figured it out a moment ago--I tried using a Hazard with a pre-existing nif instead, and it worked!