I am trying to duplicate the plasma bullets from X3 Terran Conflict in my own engine. I can't figure out how they do it. Here is what it looks like - Look at the green weapons fire at time=1:36 in the following

">video Since they allow us to modify the game. I grabbed thier model and the textures they used. What is off limits is the shader. Here is a screenshot of the model in 3ds max: Here is the texture file Here is what the texture looks like: Here is what it looks like when max renders it (obviously incorrect): There are no tutorials anywhere that I can find on how to render sci-fi weapons fire like plasma bolts, laser beams, pulse cannons, and the like. I know some people use particles, but obviously these guys used a model and I would like to also. I just don't know how to go about it. Any information is appreciated.

I cannot seem to to find the slightest bit of information on rendering weapon effects like the one above. I cannot believe noone has had to do this. They appear in almost every game! I've googled until my fingers hurt and found absolutly nothing at all on this topic. Found lots of nice plasma TVs, and a few cool photoshop tutorials, but that's about it.

I've tried particle systems and it just isn't going to work. Rendering bunches of particles for every shot is just going to bog things down too much.

There has to be a simplere method!

If anyone at all has rendered any kind of beam, laser, plasma, or other type of sci-fi weapon effects, please share how you did it. Whatever the method was.

What good is all the 3D ships, planets, nebulas, stations, asetroids, I've modeled if you can't shoot at 'em???

Try rendering that model with a standard shader, but with additive blending (D3DRS_SRCBLEND and D3DRS_DESTBLEND both set to D3DBLEND_ONE, and the D3DRS_BLENDOP set to D3DBLENDOP_ADD). Also leave z-testing enabled, but disable z-writes.

Also note that they need to be drawn after all of the standard solid geometry that's drawn with z-writes on to look right.

I believe that should get you close to the effect you want.