Right now, my tracers are just lines drawn in a batch with alpha transparency. These suffer from the obvious problem of always being 1 pixel thick; im using XNA so I cant set the line width, and anyway, this effect doesnt look nice. For lasers, I have an X cross-sectioned pair of translucent quads aligned along the direction of travel which looks OK but laser beams are somewhat thicker than tracers, and always go from point A to point B meaning that the ends usually aren't visible (they look horrible anyway).
What I want is an idea for implementing nice looking tracers supporting tiny (bullets from a machinegun) to thick trails, in 3d.
What techniques can I use?
0
Nice looking tracers
Started by speciesUnknown, Feb 21 2012 09:42 PM
2 replies to this topic
#1 Members - Reputation: 531
Posted 21 February 2012 - 09:42 PM
Don't thank me, thank the moon's gravitation pull! Post in My Journal and help me to not procrastinate!
Ad:
#2 Members - Reputation: 505
Posted 22 February 2012 - 03:20 AM
Oblong billboards of motion-blurred bullets could be aligned with the trajectory but rotated to face the camera (instead of drawing two perpendicular ones).
You have a plane defined by a line (the shot's trajectory) and a point (the camera) and a suitable billboard normal (perpendicular to the shot's line and through the camera).
You have a plane defined by a line (the shot's trajectory) and a point (the camera) and a suitable billboard normal (perpendicular to the shot's line and through the camera).
Produci, consuma, crepa
#3 Members - Reputation: 561
Posted 22 February 2012 - 02:21 PM
If you're using HDRi, you can render a mono-color capsule with your 'core' tracer color and then have the bloom pass give things a nice glow. Lots of UE3 games do something similar and I think it looks pretty nice in practice. You can also do something kind of similar substituting a billboard w/ an HDR texture if the game needs it.
EDIT: You could also texture the capsule, too.
EDIT: You could also texture the capsule, too.
clb: At the end of 2012, the positions of jupiter, saturn, mercury, and deimos are aligned so as to cause a denormalized flush-to-zero bug when computing earth's gravitational force, slinging it to the sun.
