Neat effect

I've been trolling around for information on how I could make a better looking beam weapon. One idea I had was to render them as volumes instead of flat lines. In my research I stumbled across Graphics Runner who has some neat tutorials posted on rendering volumetric effects on his blog. Check 'em out.

I'm likely to not use 3D textures like in these blogs so that I can save on resources. Instead I hope to derive the thickness of a particular section of a beam from the alpha value of that section of beam.

Stay tuned for followups, and Part 1 of my custom content processor series.