Lasers in 3D space game

Question

I am creating this little 3d space shooter and am somewhat unsure on how to implement the laser beams.

I'm thinking about something along Star Wars and the like where mostly you shoot rather short laser beams but very many of those.

Should I create a "tube" for each of the beams, render them via instancing and give them a better look just with the shader?

How would you go on about this? I was rather perplexed that there was no good tutorial on this matter out there.

Related question: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/63997/laser-beam-end-points-problems/ — msell, May 20 '15 at 18:39
Other two related questions: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/q/73395/41153 and http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/q/83861/41153 — glampert, May 20 '15 at 19:49
The best thing to do is to simply try something. If it works then stick with it. Experiment first - solve later. — Tom 'Blue' Piddock, May 21 '15 at 10:35

János Turánszki · Answer 1 · 2015-05-20T22:27:53.057

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I would do this by rendering textured quads. A single laser beam would be two rectangles intersecting each other at the center by a perpendicular angle, each sharing the same texture of the laser beam.

enter image description here

Not very much to it, you can use instancing for them, with a very simple pixel shader which just samples the texture, oh and additive blending.

edited May 20 '15 at 22:27

answered May 20 '15 at 15:48

János Turánszki

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score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '15 at 18:21

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You can also assume that "laser beam" is cylinder, and create a billboard for that:

http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/intermediate-tutorials/billboards-particles/billboards/

answered May 20 '15 at 18:21

MaKo

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This is the superior answer IMO! – Alan Wolfe May 21 '15 at 00:55

Lasers in 3D space game

2 Answers2