How to draw a spotlight in 3D

Posted by RecursiveCall on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by RecursiveCall
Published on 2014-06-05T23:15:01Z Indexed on 2014/06/06 9:42 UTC
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lighting

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special-effects

To be clear, I am not talking about the light result (the lit area) but the spotlight itself, like this

enter image description here

The two common suggestions that I tried are 2D image and a 3D cone.

The problem with the pre-regenerated 2D image is that it always look 2D and flat no matter how it is rotated in world space. The cone on the other hand is next to impossible to control when it comes to fade distance, it doesn't look soft (smooth) and it is expensive to compute.

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