Is there a way to make muzzle flash for guns? Not just an alpha texture but an actual light flash
Yes…
what you need is a BRIGHT dynamic light.
you make an IPO of the lamps RGB and energy… start Bright and go dark
I suggest atlease energy 3 for the lamps highest point…
and scale it down in 3 frames…
To make light and material IPO,s just hover mouse over the buton window ,and press Ikey. to save an IPO key…
I model my muzzleflashes out of elongated triangles, and once again an IPO to scale it…
Start Big on th first frame and scale it to nothing in 3 to 5 frames…
Press F key and in the edit buttons select the faces and set them to ADD…
Press V and vertex paint your flash… yellow and white are cool… make the white part the closest part to the barrel.
EDIT (sorry) :
You now need to make a material for your flash… soooo, make a new material with your M-flash selected,
and press the Vertex col button , and the shadeless button…
you can even take it a step furthere and make your muzzleflash with an armature, and bones connected to the triangles… so you can have the flash scale down and spin in stages…
hope this helps…
You are smart to stay away from any alpha masked texture!!
The current state of the game engine, the Alpha masked textures really, really ruin the FPS in abundance.
Good luck!
BTW… if you want to use a real game engine, that is set up for a FPS, give CrystalSpace a try…
come to #crystalspace, and I can help you set it up with blender if needed.
Ogre will be ready with blender game engine soon as well, which is going to make things verry nice 8)
also!
If you followed SnailRoses nice tutorial on lightmapping, you have set your level to a shadeless material…
This will Break all of you dynamic lighting…
Just untick the shadeless button and play with the specular mapping…
You can use GLSL shaders for a specular and bumpmap if needed…
BUT REMEMBER,
when you use shaders like this you are TRIPPLEing your textures size in most cases.
(unless some idiot programmer made the shader materials and gave you a 128x128 diffuse texture and a 64x64 specular, and a 32x32 normal map, to keep things “optimal”)
most of the recent games with normal mapping look crappy in my opinion anyways… everything looks like it is covered in a dull doughnut glaze.
only thing I see it use nicely on is slimey things,wet things, and on dull metals.