UFO Abduction Beam

Hello,

I am fairly new to Unity and I am working on a UFO Abduction game. I am using it as a learning experience after building a simple race car game. I am running in to some issues with figuring out exactly how to create a tractor beam effect and I have been scouring the unity forums and the internet and not having much luck finding information on creating such an effect such as a tractor/abduction beam. I am pretty sure I can figure out the mechanics of actually beaming up an object once a collision is triggered, I am stuck on what type of object is best used to create the effect of the tractor beam. I hope that makes sense

I was wondering if you anyone could be so kind as to point me in the right direction? What would be best to create the beam? Are there any tutorials for something similar that I could use to create the effect?

Thanks in advance.

-Jack

 

I would just use a few different sprites. Like, maybe a small sliver of a line shooting downwards from the spaceship as its "Detecting beam". Then, if it detects, you could make it flash on/off or flash a different color. After a couple seconds you could have it widen to almost like a triangle/cone or just make it widen in general. So, one image for the idle, one or two images for when it detects something, and then like a 3-5 image animation for when it is actually grabbing something. I would keep it simple, get it to work and look okay, and then once it works, add some flare and make it look good.