[Need help]Could you please show me how to make special effect in 3D game

[doqkhanh]

Hi,
I have been reading about such effects in games as smoke, fog, fire and magic... I can truely understand how to create smoke, fog and fire since they are well presented in 3D programming books [1] but magic effect seems to be unclear to me.

I don't know the exact keyword or the effects' names in order to search for them. Google's results with the keywords "special effect" or "gamefx" provided me no appropriate results.

Could you please show me how to make it or could you suggest any such things as books, blogs, websites... that I can make it myself. Can I create this effect easily by using Microsoft's effect .x files?

Thank you very much!!!

Here is some effect [2]
http://www.arcane-fx.com/afx_gallery/gallery_pics/sor_b.jpg
http://www.arcane-fx.com/afx_gallery/gallery_pics/ap_c.jpg
http://www.arcane-fx.com/afx_gallery/gallery_pics/fb_b.jpg
http://www.arcane-fx.com/afx_gallery/gallery_pics/rm_a.jpg

[1]Special Effects Game Programming with DirectX (The Premier Press Game Development Series) Muska & Lipman, Premier-Trade, ISBN 1931841063
[2]http://www.arcane-fx.com/afx_gallery/afx_gallery_scr.html

[mmakrzem]

Those look like particle effects to me. Create an equation of motion for the particle field. Then when give each particle some sort of glowing/radiating attribute so that as it is moving along the path of motion, it glows and changes color.

A lot of these effects are now done in the shader to off load processing power from the CPU and onto the GPU.