So glad to see people are still interested! This project has gained enough positive feedback and snowballed so hard that I’m considering making this a “full” commercial release that I work on over the next several months, instead of switching gears to something new and having to mooch off my girlfriend for another year.
I’m going to try and post more bitesize updates with explanations again.
So recently I improved the rocket smoke (again). I forget why I decided to do this. At first I tried experimenting with a subsurface shading model:
This looked great! But it had several practical issues. The lights didn’t really pierce through the smoke from behind like I expected, and the individual sprite silhouettes were too well defined in motion for something that was supposed to look volumetric. It was also more expensive and didn’t add much hue that the BaseColor couldn’t more easily. The spherical particle normals looked excellent, but were a little too spherical, and clipped the sprite edges that extended past the sphere’s boundaries.
I tried going for a more abstract look with some emissive warmth:
This didn’t make for as pretty screenshots, but was much nicer in motion.
Eventually though I tried baking the normals ahead of time in Substance Designer. I blended the normal map for a sphere with a tiny bit of normals generated using the BaseColor as a heightmap, which resolved the spherical clipping. Add some black-body heat simulation to the emissive channel and we get the best of both worlds!
