How do I create a fireball, please help

How do I create a fireball, please help

• 10wattmindtrip

  To be physically accurate, you might think that a glass material and a red light would work... but in practice that won't really do anything much. Or, it would require a very complex rendering pipeline to get it working
  
  A fireball will typically be a specialization of a "particle system" - the fireball itself can either be a single particle, or a "cloud" of particles (depending on quite what sort of effect you want to achieve). I'd suggest doing some research into particle systems. Direct3D features "Point Sprites" as a convenient method for creating these sorts of effects.
  
  Once you've got the actual geometry sorted out, you need to look into some texturing effects. This is where the real magic comes into play...
  
  Depending on how you do the first part, you'll want to have a texture of a generic "fireball" (I recommend making it a greyscale noise texture) that you can apply to the sprites. You can then specify the colour via the vertex properties (that way you can have it pulsate from red/orange/yellow etc..). You want to combine this with some sort of alpha mask and/or alpha channel so that it blends with the rest of the scene behind it (hint: always draw your fireball LAST on each frame!).
  
  As I've probably demonstated - it's a fairly broad topic; sadly there isn't a device->DrawCoolFireball() method (yet).
  
  hth
  Jack
  
  
  

• Daniel Holt

  Thank you very much, it's really helpful!!
  I'll do some research on particle system, and hopefully write a DrawCoolFireball() soon :)
  
• How do I create a fireball, please help