Beams and flashes

Hi guys. Ive been puzzling over this one for a little while now. Does anyone have fast code for drawing glow effects. By glow I mean something which isnt obviously a sprite, can be blurred effectively and is intensely bright.

An example for FFX players would be the beams that the Magus Sisters fire during their overdrive or the core of the ultima spell before the explosion begins.

Sprites have always proven to be too translucent for the purpose and to create a beam, lots of them need to be created in close proximity. Worse still, how it looks would depend on the camera. I dont mind using some form of WritePixelFast routine, but I have my doubts as to how fast it would be.

That tough eh? How do the pro's do it? There has to be a reproducable method for this somewhere.

Cones, in a cone... in a cone
use an alpha map PNG with say a flame and the blend them together... tho i still dont know how they do it fully

id make a cylidner for the beam, and then use my modified bloom fitler to glow it :)

Well, thats how FFXI (a PC\PS2 MMORPG) does that, just a bunch of close alpha'd sprite's with a lil' multiply blending.....and it's real pretty too....

So good and inneficient?

I would use a particle system, the one I'm working on now allows you to align particles to their motion vector.

shattered: huh?

Yeah the bloom filter is kinda slow, compared to other methods you could use, like shattered's.

ah, i see, thats a good point, however glowing just one object with the bloom gives very nice results :P haven't tryed it with multiple though.

I won't knock bloom at all, we have a very nice set of post render filters working. But I don't think I would use it for beams of light. Sprites are the key!! ;)