So as the title says, im trying to get some post processing work done to make my game look better and i dont know how to make volumetric fog that isnt extremely performance hungry while still maintaining night in my scene and not be spotty, keeping said fog out of the house without adding 3 more niagaras so that it envelops the house from around, how to make lights pop at night like these reflective posts () on the side of the road or just lamps while in said fog, make the scene a bit blurry but keep everything visible and just generally making my game look better. But the fog is the main thing i want to get right. The only light sources will be some lamps on the road, the headlights on the car, the dashboard of the car, a few lamps in houses, and another car. Can someone give me tips to make if not all but some of this happen? thanks
i forgot to add that the map is quite big, so fog over the entire map is i think out of the question, with post processing material it just doesnt look right
I think bullet points of your goals might make this clearer, but I’ll try to take a crack at it.
First off, what does ‘moody’ post-processing mean? What mood: fear, claustrophobia, wistfulness, surealness, etherealness,etc?
What does ‘maintaining night’ mean to you? Keeping a clear night sky without things getting hazy and light pollution-y?
Managing volumetric fog can be done with particles, but you can also make volumetric fog exclusion volumes that take on brush shapes, you’d need to consult documentation to know how though. It’s cheaper than a lot of niagara calls.
Fundumentally, there aren’t a lot of ways to just generally optimize volumetric fog because it relies on, well, volume data. You’re telling the game engine to perform a light-scattering simulation for the some length of the camera frustrum, which is pricy. You can, via console variables or scalability settings, tweak some of the behavior: you could make the voxels for the fog bigger, which makes it blockier but consume less memory. You could make the ray-marching cheaper, but that’ll create artifacts and jittering. It’s all about tradeoffs. You could tell the volumetric fog to end early and replace with a cheaper height fog simulation, which is less robust but way more performant.
There are so many different ways to tweak fog behavior: you could adjust the exponentialheightvolume’s height cutoffs to make the ground foggier than the sky, you could adjust the scattering and extinction of individual lights to make them feel ‘thicker’ or thinner, you could tweak the PPvolume’s settings too. Note: ray-traced shadows won’t work with volumetric fog, it’s kind of one or the other rn without hacks.
Are you going for anything like this?
thanks for replying, here are the answers i was thinking about
-mainly fear and loneliness
-so that it looks dark but the fog is still visible lets say below street lamps and in front of the car, so it’s almost pitch black but you can still see the fog and feel that it envelops you (I’ve had problems with the headlights not penetrating the fog and not being visible at all or just straight up blind me)
-and yes the picture is something that would be good but with a few additions, less visibility, darker night, with rain (I have ultra dynamic sky for this) and just generally gloomier
Are there types of settings in like a postprocess volume that make a dark gloomy game just generally look better?
What you’re wanting to do is entirely achievable, yes. I think you might want to assemble a vision board/project goals if you’re looking to achieve a very cohesive look, and some tutorials on unreal engine’s post-processing stack would be very helpful.
Mood in unreal engine has many different components, especially with atmospherics. What do you mean by ultra dynamic sky by the way?
You have your directional light, sky light, volumetric/exponential height fog and sky atmosphere all with their own controls. You can also build local fog volumes and attach them to car rigs to get more controllable local fog, you can adjust per-light scattering, etc.
Post-processing means everything from bloom, to depth-of-field, vingette, chromatic abberation, color-grading, and a lot more. I think you should have a very strong idea of what settings you want to change to evoke a given mood, that’s a good starting space.
ultra dynamic sky is a weather and as the name implies sky asset, it has volumetric clouds and all that.
Do you have any recommendations for the fog though, you said i could use an exponential height fog (volumetric on) with the view distance on like 2-3000 and then use another height fog simulation?
thanks for the scattering and extincion, those are good so far
If i want to make the fog have “shapes and outlines” like clouds or have that volume effect without niagara, is there a way to make that happen?
I’m going for something like this, it doesnt have to be the exact same but i think you get the idea.
This is extremely doable, but performance control will be the big challenge for you.
So, exponential height fog is actually two different simulation paradigms rolled into one actor: the cheaper, legacy version is, well, exponential height fog. It increases opacity into the distance, with rules on the height it can set in at, coloring and some light interaction, but it’s otherwise nonphysical. It is fast though, which is very important.
The second simulation is volumetric fog, which does an approximate simulation of how light scatters through air, it’s what creates the really nice looking god rays and light shafts. Way more expensive, but really good results. That’s why you can keep the volumetric fog range short, and have it fall back to the cheaper height fog if you get far enough away.
What do you mean by shapes and outlines?