Mr Boo

Well if your plasma bolt is a texture and it's got a solid black background like the muzzle flashes used on the tanks, then:

1 - Apply your texture to your object
2 - Select "Add" in the "shader" pulldown tab
3 - Set the "Emissive" to pure White in the Vertex Material Tab

You don't need an alpha mask and any pixels that are pure black will be removed and the pixles remaining will have a "hotter" glow due to you setting the emissive to pure white.

You can always fiddle with the colors in the emissive to achieve your bolts color, like blue, purple, etc...

Well I think the Treads are fixed now

Your welcome

Hey MonkeyStuff,

Thought I'd give ya a bit of an update to this excellent method.

In Pic 1 You can leave the Second texture to Base Map

In Pic 2 You should change the Emmissive to WHITE

In Pic 3 You shoud change Pri Gradient to MODULAR

And also note that the more "white" in your models texture the more "reflective" it will be, but all white to too much white will also blur out details on the texture and just make it way too shiney. A little off white to grey works great.

You can also experment with the first texture and use different colors, as goes the same for the second. Been testing with all kinds of patterns and wild images and getting really wacked results from plasma type boiling balls to dark flowing enegry...