   rocket exhaust fx
  Hi!well i'm trying to achieve this cool spaceship engine exhaust flare glowing thinghy :)you know, that burst of flames/plasma that a rocket engine fires;this is to be incorporated in a game, not to be rendered with 3rd party stuff (well i do plan 2 use 3ds max to make it..), so my idea 'till now is:have a streched out and smoothed 3d cone, with a pixel shader on top; (possibly a vertex shader too, for animating things like ignition, burnout etc)the shader must be in HLSL (so i can easily test in game & 3dsmax) and must be a heavy glow/overbright/aa thing...trouble is this kind of shader is hard to come by :( and i'm only started with HLSL - i'm a trained c++ programmer at heart :(any ideas ? similar shaders out there ? what do u think of this whole approch ?tnx in advance,cheers!vali.   
  doesn't your engine have a particle system? just make a fire particle system where the engine is , then make a smoke particle system thats near the same color as the fire, then make a seperate smoke particle system thats grey. and there you have it, if done right it should look pretty good. i don't see a reason to use performance costing HLSL shaders for soemthing this simple.   ;  tnx, but nowadays for particles to look good they must be shaded in some way... so it's back to the glow stuff...i would like to test beforehand all the gfx concepts in 3ds max, so using particles in there would be awkward...;  "so using particles in there would be awkward..." not really, using particle systems in 3ds max is quite easy really, but whatever you want i guess.   ;  no, i ment exporting them to the game engine...that kind of a shader shoudn't be that of a performance downer, but it restricts u  to certain hardware, i will have to think about fallback, but the fx wouldn't be there anymore :(to tell u the truth, i dont know anymore :)