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Right now I'm developing a relatively simple first person game where you are standing at the end of the tunnel of light saving the souls that come through before they get past you and enter hell. Broken down into programming speak, the souls are spheres. There is also an orb (sphere) on each corner of the "arena" that randomly attacks (shoot small fireball like spheres) at the player (you).

Right now they look rather primitive and plain. They are textured, and I experimented with cull and shosting and lighting effects, but they still all just like fancy spheres. I want to add some glowing aura of sorts around the soul and some fire-effects to the fireballs. How would I go about doing this?

I've experimented with using constantly rotating plains textured with partially transparent areas that are oriented to the soul or the fireball, but then they just look like spheres with 2d plains rotating about them. It still looks cheap. Any way to create 3d explosion or aura effects?

hm maybe make a second or even third orb slightly larger than your original, make them a little transparent and place them around your original? just a thought...

You could try to put a plain inside a bit bigger than the sphere and use "set object to camera orientation", or something like that. If you have illustrator a program like that, you could create a radial gradient and texture the ghosted plain. Something like this:

http://www.geocities.com/andrew11m/sun2.bmp
stupid geocities... You'll have to paste it in your browser or save target as.

You could also try some particle effects.

"set object to camera orientation"

Thanks a lot, that's just what I needed. I got some gradient-like textures that I can use to add "glow" to a number of objects.