Light and Glowing effects

Okay well I want to try some tests with lighting. For example, say I want to make a dark dungeon with glowing torches on the wall to cast light, I'm assuming I make the torch mesh then just place a light at the same position as the torch entity?

But how would I go about making it look like it's glowing? Say like a wizard fireball or something? I want to do cool glowing effects that cast shadows but I'm not quite sure if just using a light source is going to do what I want it to. It would create light but how do I make the object look like it's glowing? Is that a 3D feature I can actually do with Blitz 3D, or is that something too advanced?

Here is a pic I whipped up quick in 3dsmax to clarify what I'm trying to do here:



So for instance, I could load the mesh of the sphere I'm using as a laser beam, wizard spell, whatever, but how would I make it appear with the glowing effect as depicted in the example?

The only possible thing I could think of is create a light and always set it's position to the sphere entity, but I don't know if that would work or produce the effect I'm looking for.

Just put a glow texture onto a sprite and position the sprite on your entity.

I did the same thing to make the cubes glow in my game Hover Cube.

Here is a link to a glow effect. It uses the method described by Mikel above.

www.andimages.com/proofs/pongo/blitz/disc_glow.zip

The second example uses a glow sprite to give the glow effect. The first example is just a texture with no glow sprite.

If you want the light to react with the rest of the scene, then you will need to place a light at the same position, but that will still fall short of what you are asking. (There will be no shadows)