Light Shafts on Point Lights?

Is it currently possible to have light shafts emitted from Point lights? Right now it only shows the option for Light Shafts on the Directional light class, is something that is going to be added once the lighting system is more developed?

Hi CharlestonS,

is only available on the Directional Lights at the moment. I have reached out to a developer to see if is something that will be implemented in the future. I saw that was available in UE3/UDK before.

I’ll get back to you on !

The code mostly supports point lights but it’s not exposed because there are some severe problems remaining.

For the bloom component of the light shafts, it’s really unwieldy to use with a point light because you have to make sure there are bright opaque pixels right near the light’s actual position. In practice it is very difficult to setup so that it looks right.

For the occlusion component of the light shafts, lights don’t have a volumetric inscattering effect yet so there’s nothing to shadow. is where light shafts on point lights could really excel, but we’re missing the other that needs to be done first.

Looking forward to some Lords of the Fallen/AC4 like implementation in the indeterminate future.

Yes, it was available on point lights in UDK and it would make some of the things i’m trying to achieve much easier if it were available in UE4 as well, thanks for looking into !

It would probably be cooler to use some sort of ray marching volumetric light solution instead. That would allow for awesome shadowmapped volumetric lights as well and the cost isn’t insanely high from what I recall.

A volumetric shadowmap based method would definitely be higher quality. Light shafts kindof suck due to their screenspace nature. However it’s a lot of work to implement a performant version of that, have a look at these

http://www.sfb716.uni-stuttgart.de/uploads/tx_vispublications/espmss10.pdf

One day =)

Natural Selection 2 had some awesome tech demos of volumetric light scattering. I’m wondering how they achieved it.

Think you’re missing the new hotness there. http://bglatzel.movingblocks.net/publications/ Less than 1ms on a PS4. Ubisoft did something similar for AC4. Render time depends on shadow map complexity/number.

That’s some very cool and clever stuff, Frenetic Pony.

Any news about light shafts on the spot/point lights?
Would be very, very useful.

At some point they will probably add volumetric lighting which will will be much better (current effect is a post process and not physically based). It’s on the list of things they want to do but no set time for when they could get to it.

Would be great if it could finally get some attention :slight_smile:

It probably will take a while before they get something similar to a marching ray algorithm going.

I would also highly welcome the addition of true volumetric lighting. Games like Killzone: Shadow Fall and Alan Wake show how it can greatly enhance the atmosphere.

Plus it looks like many folks are doing non-gaming stuff like visualizations and could be pretty useful eyecandy :slight_smile:

And Alien: Isolation, and GTAV, and The Last of Us.

I get excited whenever I see it in a game, it’s a very cool effect

+1

Say what you will about the game (got it for free with my 980, gg so far :wink: ), but the volumetric lighting in AC Unity is really well done. It might be used a bit too much sometimes, but it is still really impressive. Would love to have added to UE4!

GTA V online on Christmas day and New Years Day when they had the snow. The night time was amazing! :smiley:

Yeah, they upgraded the atmospheric system and it’s looks really insane. They had the volumetric lighting before, but they also added world volumetric lighting.