I’m starting this thread to post updates on how this is coming together. I thought this might be a good place to document the progression and act as a bit of a personal diary. It’s been bits and pieces of experiments that is slowly coming together. Feel free to comment or ask questions!
Just had a thought about instead of doing realtime self shadows on the GPU, I’'ll just store precomputed shadows in the volume texture in RGB and can pick/blend channels with a mask.
I wish translucent materials could cast shadows without self shadowing. Just a simple single pass shadow would be fine.
Thought I’d play with some of the free foliage pack stuff and see how the lighting looks with some actual things in the world. Also have got some of the atmosphere clouds in there to fill the gaps between the trees.