How to make Homeworld style aviation lights?

Questions & Answers
1

Aviation lights on Homeworld ships are more visible than other ship parts in distance and therefore create a good effect similar to real-life aviation lights in distance.

My guess is that Relic (developers of Homeworld series) used something similar to flares.
Any help on how to create such effect would be appreciated.

2

Normally you’d create a billboard (ie. a plane that automatically rotates to always face the camera) that scales itself up based on the distance to the camera. The texture on the billboard would be a PNG of a light flare - in Photoshop you would just put a radial gradient in the center of a square.

For example, you could try the following (in C#)

void Update()
{
   //Billboarding - make the plane look at the camera...
   transform.LookAt(Camera.main);

   //Calculate the distance between model and camera and scale the plane up...
   Vector3 Difference = Camera.main.transform.position - transform.position;
   transform.localScale = new Vector3(Difference.magnitude,Difference.magnitude,Difference.magnitude);
}

Note that I haven’t played Homeworld in quite some time, and that this particular script would probably scale the lights WAY too much at long distances. You would probably need to square root the number or perform some other mathematical trick to grow your plane in a non-linear way.

3

I didn’t look at the video closely, but why not just use Flares, as you suggest?
Here’s something I whipped up, using the docs: Unity - Manual: Flare asset
and the standard flares.

[4905-screen+shot+2012-11-12+at+1.50.25+pm.png|4905]

Get in touch and I can send you the project.