Effect Tutorial: The Light Burst, Part 3
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.
Multiple Textures
Two lightbursts are better than one. By doubling up our texture, we get the benefit of twice the amount of rays coming off our burst, and twice the blending for an even brighter effect. Check it out:
I’ve left the borders on in the 4GE editor so you can see the 2 separate textures. Notice that I have scaled and rotated each one so their rays go in different directions, hiding the fact that the same texture is used twice. These textures blend well with each other for an even brighter effect. If you feel brave you can repeat this process a few more times for an even brighter effect, but don’t get too carried away.
Rotation
Now that we’ve got 2 textures, slowly spinning them can make this effect even better. Each texture is spinning in a different direction and I’ve set their rotation speeds slightly out of synch so they won’t tend to match up.
Flicker Shader
This effect can be taken one step further by the application of a very simple fragment shader. My shader knowledge is next-to-nothing, but with little difficulty, I was able to create a shader that would “flicker” an object’s color value. More specifically, this shader multiplies its fragement’s color by an alternating value, for example, back and forth between 0.7 and 0.71. The net effect is a fragment that “flickers”. I only applied this shader to one of the two textures, any more and it gets too bright and annoying.
And that’s it! We’ve now got a smooth looking lightburst. These same techniques can be applied to many different textures to make just about anything glow. These textures don’t have to be greyscale either, you can get some cool results with colored textures as well. If you have questions about anything in this tutorial series, as always, don’t hesitate to ask.
Go forth and create great lightburst effects!