How do you do this. I call it this because...look at the picture: Notice the green beam. Notice the white beam. My question is: how can you do this kind of effect without using a high poly model. I thought this could be done like billboarding, but it is more complex then that. Edited by - nes8bit on 5/18/00 7:06:09 PM

There was an article about advanced particle systems (a pdf taken from GDMag). This has a funky blue lightning effect at the end of the article. Apparently it uses a heirarchy of branches and sub branches of animated particles. The article doesn''t go into any more detail though, so I can''t tell you much more about it, apart from that it looks really cool.

-- Jon Hobson --

I think they do it using stencil buffering. i''ve never tried that myself

- pouya
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Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: "Mankind". Basically, it's made up of two separate words - "mank" and "ind". What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind

I know how to do the arcing lightning. You have a few mesh "grids" that are, for instance, 1 vertex by 10 vertices. There are about 3 or 4 of these grids, all rotated randomly around a common center line (running down the long way), to form a really elongated extruded star. Then the vertices are randomly displaced, and the texture coordinates are animated. The lightning mesh is drawn with additive transparency. If you draw a medium-light aura around the central beams on the lightning texture, you can get some reasonably similar effects to the one in the top pic. I''m sure you could also align the lightning meshes so that most of them are seen correctly, too.

lntakitopi@aol.com | http://geocities.com/guanajam/

umm, are you talking about light? I''m talking about the beam. I just want to use a rectangular strip and rotate it so that it looks like it''s round.

I *think* that they are repeting sprites... (atleast the UT one)

The other one i dont realy know... about the same i would guess?

========================
Game project(s):
www.fiend.cjb.net

Well, I''m talking about doing it a way so you don''t really have to rotate it... I''m not sure how to align the rectangle to the screen.

lntakitopi@aol.com | http://geocities.com/guanajam/

quote: Original post by JonatanHedborg

I *think* that they are repeting sprites... (atleast the UT one)

The other one i dont realy know... about the same i would guess?

========================
Game project(s):
www.fiend.cjb.net

That is exactally what I''m talking about.

Okay, you want a beam of light, not lightning, right?
This is a variation of a "look-at" function:
There are two planes, one aligned to the poly/sprite and another perpendicular { _!_ the perpendicular symbol, sorta} to the first such that it runs along the beam. Align {rotate} the _!_ so that it contains the point the viewer's camera is at. Now just derive the poly's facing.

Edited by - SonicSilcion on May 19, 2000 5:28:56 PM

um...what? I almost get it. I think.