Hi there!
Result Example
I’m trying to figure out a way to make this kind of light aura around objects…
It doesn’t look like a real directional light with some fog scattering to me, I mean, that’s the effect, but judging on how the other elements don’t project any shadows, my guess is it’s either a plane on the back of the planet, maybe a niagara sprite animation with some sort of animated radial godrays, or some type of overlay material on the planet that casts light rays.
Likewise in the video, for my application I don’t care too much of having realistic light rays interaction with the environment, I’m lookinf for this god rimlight effect, that simulates godrays.
Any suggestion?
I mean it says exactly how he created this effect in the artstation post linked in the youtube video?
“Additionally, I integrated a custom god ray effect by positioning a point light with volumetric shadows inside the planet. I developed a custom material network for the Shadow Pass, making continents opaque and oceans transparent, produceing the god rays from continents”
Thanks! Yes I didn’t see the explainer on artstation, my bad! Thanks a lot!
I tried using this method, but I can’t seem to make it work. So I’m trying the shadow pass switch trick, as seen in the Artstation description, I have both a White on black texture of planet earth, and a white on alpha. I tried every possible combination. Shadow Pass switch doesn’t seem to work in any way whatsoever, I always get the shadow for the whole texture, no matter the combination I insert in to the shadow pass switch, I can’t seem to get the silhouette of the continents, I get a flat shadow.
Only way it kinda works is if I plug the texture directly into the opacity mask, but then I get a masked planet, with transparency on the black areas of the texture, and even in that case, volumetric shadows works only from a direct light source, no volumetric shadows coming from point or area lights (and yes, I’ve enabled both cast shadows and cast volumetric shadows for the light sources, nothing changes),
Am I missing something? Raytracing is enabled in the project, I do get volumetric ray traced shadows from a directional light, but it doesn’t work on point light or area light, and other than that, I can’t seem to use the shadow pass switch to trick unreal to use the texture only to affect shadows without actually masking the texture on the planet.
There’s something I’ve noticed, in the planet material, in the advanced section, just underneath the Decal Response (DBuffer), there’s a checkmark for Cast Dynamic Shadow as Masked, and that’s turned off and greyed out. I tried switching everything in order to make it available, but nothing.
Am I missing something? I feel like there’s some parameter that needs to be checked on or off, maybe in the project settings, and everything will work as it should…
Ah yeah the shadow pass switch node only works on masked materials I think, so that would be the issue in that case. Youd have to switch your opaque material to masked