We have arrived at my favorite part of this tutorial, Part 3! In this part, we’re going to take our already-cool lightburst effect and make it even cooler, with a few simple tricks.

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Welcome to Part 2 of the lightburst tutorial.

Yesterday in Part 1, I laid out some simple steps in Photoshop to create a nice texture for our lightburst. Today, I’m going to load that texture in the 4GE game engine and apply some different blending modes to get glowing results. Tomorrow in Part 3, I will use some nice shader and scripting techniques to really make this tutorial shine.

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Here’s a topic I’ve been meaning to put together a tutorial on for quite a while, and that is how to make a good-looking lightburst effect. For years I’ve been seeing effects like this in games, from full-on light explosions, to glowing balls of energy, to tiny sparkles used as particle effects. It seemed a very useful thing to be able to create this “glow” effect but I had never been able to find any good information on how to do it. So one afternoon I decided to sit down and figure it out for myself. Except it took me a week. And ths is what I came up with!

To get us started, here is an image of the end result we’re after:

This screenshot was taken from within the 4GE engine, the driving force behind Thorodin. This effect uses a combination of 3 techniques which I aim to cover in this tutorial series.

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