Electricity

This might not belong in the “beginner” forum, but I’ll try it out anyway. Is there a relatively simple way to make an okay-looking electricity/spark effect in OpenGL? I just want a moving bolt of electricity to go between two cylinders. I know how to make the cylinders.

I’m using VC++ 6 if that matters (don’t think it does).

Create a bunch of animated textures of a lightning bolt. Then, scale it to fit between the two endpoint cylinders and display each frame of the animated texture.

That could work, but I was thinking of something to calculate it on-the-fly…

maybe…
use a load of sprite particles, where each particle is fired at the other sphere with a random offset angle, and each particle is attracted to the other sphere? using lotsa particles it could work

throws some sparks that dont go to the other sphere to make it look good

You might want to try this site. Really interesting tutorials there…

http://www.sulaco.co.za/opengl2.htm

Nick