Making various beams and particles like in Magic Mods.

So I don't know if any of you have seen any Magic Mod before. If not, you can go look it up, but basically, they always seem to have glowing particles that aren't just the simple 2-D particles and all of that. In fact, for my mod I'm trying to create Lightning. Not in ties with Magic, but I am trying to get it to look like how they make theirs look. It's very flowy and glowing and all of that, while the Minecraft lightning is straight up and down and very boring to look at.

So TL;DR: is there any way to create Lightning and beam particles like how they've done it in the Magic Mods. (Also, if anyone knows how to change the vanilla look of Lightning, that would be awesome too)