   Star Wars Blaster Laser
  Hello, I'm trying to make a Star wars game on the Quake 3 Engine, and I'd like to know what would be the best way to make a blaster bolt ?See it looks like this in my game at the moment :ScreenshotHere is the problem...ScreenshotI've heard about modeling a cylinder, is it possible to make a glowing texture around it then ?I thought about using sprites, but how can I make it rotating on 1 axis only ?Because err... ScreenshotScreenshotWhat would be the best way please ?Thanks for your replies.   
  That heavily depends on what the rendering engine you are using is capable of. Nowadays if you have a scene glow high dynamic rendering pipeline available you could just draw a simple one pixel red line with a glow scale factor of 10 or something like that. Applying a HDR glow afterwards would take care of bleeding the red color to make it look as it should.   ;Quote:Original post by WaterwalkerThat heavily depends on what the rendering engine you are using is capable of. Nowadays if you have a scene glow high dynamic rendering pipeline available you could just draw a simple one pixel red line with a glow scale factor of 10 or something like that. Applying a HDR glow afterwards would take care of bleeding the red color to make it look as it should.Agreed, and if you were using deferred rendering, you could draw that cylindrical light volume and actually have the laser contribute to the lighting of the scene a bit. In the newer movies when they are... i think on the geanotion(sp?) planet there is a scene where a bunch of blaster lasers are getting fired in a cloud of smoke. reds and greens of the lasers lit up the smoke. Looked really awesome, was either the above or most likely radiosity. But thats prolly a bit overboard for your game? =)Oh and if you are talking about point sprites that wont work because they always face the screen... and they are 2d so if you rotate them your laser will have no volume (look flat).   ;  You might try the NVIDIA Volumetric Lines approach.   ;  You could construct the lazer bolt with about 10 small sphere like sprites in a row, and make them always orientate to the screen.That awy wouldnt be as quick but it might give you want your after.   ;  If you're asking how to orient it "right", then you just want the normal on the same plane as your view direction. In other words, the cross product of the "forward" of your bolt and your view direction should be the bolts "right". Ergo the cross product of this "forward" and "right" will give you the correct normal.Now, since "right", "up"(normal), "forward" and "position" happen to be the four columns of the bolts transformation matrix...The nVidia file looks a lot more interesting and elaborate though.   