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Special effects 3D games, fire, lightning, water and ice

I am working on a 3d game using OpenGL, and would like to take it in the direction of fantasy. In particular, I think of magic with effects for fire, water, ice, and lightning. My problem is that I do not know how to create these effects. Are there any resources for me how to find out something like this?

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directx graphics 3d opengl
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4 answers

Xavier:

I always go directly to the GPU vendor development sites. They will have a complete development environment created and having literally hundreds of ready-to-use code samples.

For example, check out the NVIDIA dev website for GPU Gems: there are several articles about the effects of water.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gpu_gems_home.html

The main engines do a great job with these physical simulation effects, and if you really don't want to become a special effects artist, I would suggest choosing an engine that will do the effects, as you know that they will do this, well-known methods at that time, and they have a commercial incentive to continue to improve.

The fact that the GPU now has so much processing power that it can perform these complex physical effects creates another barrier to entry: you need to know and want to know the details of NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs and Intel GPUs, etc. d. This is a full-time job, and if you are focused on using these effects, then you can get more information.

However, having said that if you are really interested in how these special effects work, I suggest you join the Blender community ( http://www.blender.org ). There are really good people there, and the community is ready to help. Another valuable resource is the Bullet physics engine ( http://bulletphysics.org/wordpress/ ). This is the third most popular physics engine for the Havok and PhysX games, which are major commercial projects.

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You should look for the Particle System . There are some ready to be built into your application or you can develop your own if you feel strong enough with such things.

They are fairly easy to implement, you can find many examples at gamedev.net or gamasutra.com

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I highly recommend reading the NeHe manuals for OpenGL (http://nehe.gamedev.net/). This is essential for an OpenGL beginner.

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Mark dotted sprites .

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