Does anyone know of a way to create a fireball effect using directx? What I basically want is something like a fireball or like a rocket exhaust trail that will not involve a lot of calculations but looks nice as well. I''ve tried doing things like taking faces and then sticking them together so you have a sort of 3D X shape, but it doesn''t look nice and there seems to be a problem with the alpha blending because one side blends in nicely but the other side looks as if alpha blending was disabled. This is what I mean: (please excuse my crummy diagram) 1 2 __ __ \ \/ / \__\/ / /\ /__/\_\ 3 4 THat wuold be the 3D "X" I mentioned that I created by sticking two faces diagonally into eachother. The side 1 and 3 would belnd in nicely (since this would have a plasma-like texture so it''s semi-transparent) but then side 2 and 4 wouldnt, side 2 would appear to have had alpha blending turned off

Try using Billboarding

Instead of making an X make like a + with another plane through it. Like so

****|********|****----+----****|********|****

ok the *s are a plane with its face facing you the -s are another plane through the first plane with its edge facing you and the |s are one last plane through the second plane with its edge facing you. There is a tutorial on how to do thin to make sort of a plasma energy blast in blender in the tutorials in the blender community ( blender3d.com)

Now this may work for fire balls but probably not for rocket trails, for that just implement a particle system. And the alpha blending may be getting messed up because of back face culling.

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Matthew
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Edited by - TheRealMAN11 on January 1, 2002 10:08:37 PM

The best way to do effects like the one you speak of is by using a particle system. Richard "Keebler" Benson created a pretty advanced particle system with diffrent effects and source code in direct X. You can download it off of http://www.particlesystems.com/html/pchamber.html