How can I create a glowing, smooth line of any shape?

Questions & Answers
1

I’m making a game where the user uses a touchscreen to draw a line on the screen. I want it to look sort of like a glowing laser beam.

Right now, when I draw the line, I map x/y coordinates of the touch every frame, and draw a new cube where the edges touch the coordinates on each side.

I gave these cubes a transparent material that has a kind of beam-like appearance.

The problem is clear - the cubes touch on the center of the sides, but the corners either overlap or leave a gap in between, so it looks very jagged.

Here is what it looks like if I just use a generic diffuse material:

Better, but it’s just a line, I don’t get any glowing effect.

Any idea how I can get the effect I want? Note that I don’t have unity pro.

I’ve tried a line renderer but it is not much different than the above solutions.

2

I would recommend to use particles for this. This actually requires a lot of particles, but Unity can handle them quite good.

You can use the default (circular) sprite for this. Just give them a color and let the particle emitter move with the user’s touch. If you’re not looking too close this should appear as a smooth line then.

3

You could use a TrailRenderer or LineRenderer, adding points as the user draws, or use the custom GUI Line Drawing function, but I’m not sure how a glowing effect could be achieved there.