which ideally would be a stylized and low cost way to recreate dust particles in a light shaft like TLOU:
But all I managed to come up with was this:
it’s a rectangle light touching the floor (as light from a door would probably be) and some self illuminated niagara particles, but:
-light on the ground is too harsh
-dust don’t look as if it was being lit by the door light
-no light shafts (haven’t figured out how to fake them)
-light doesn’t look dynamic
any suggestions on how I could improve it? (or redo entirely, probably)
I’m using a fresnel node like the vid suggested to get it fading smoothly at the round edges (in red), but this node produces a smooth curve, making it very opaque where the geometry is facing the camera (in green).
How do I adjust the fresnel curve? I need the center (of a hypothetical fresnel sphere) to be a flat color such as white, and only then after a certain distance from the center, start fading to black. a cheap contrast won’t do it. I remember from old Ben Cloward vids that he used to do this all the time, but I can’t remember how or find a vid showing it. has to do with getting the fresnel node and adding or multiplying to a power or something.
It looks like you need it to be more opaque on the ‘axis’ of the actor?
Maybe you could measure the distance from that vector somehow, or, I recall BC talking about ‘wetness decals’ and a lot of masking going on there, could it have been that?
however I still need to fade the inner edge (red), similarly, and the upper and lower edges (green, which are the ones I was trying to use the fresnel node, without much success)
It’s basically a blueprint that takes all the guess work out of it.
This took a couple of minutes
It’s totally flat, but you can walk around it
It think you need to go down the ‘flat’ route, or just use volumetrics
The vendor stopped on 4.27, I assume because of volumetrics, but I still use this now. Volume fog is too hard to control ( inside and outside ), and eats frames the way this method doesn’t at all.
Right, volumetrics would be “easy”, but I don’t want to use volumetrics since this game is supposed to run on a potato.
I want to use these god rays to make it more obvious where doors are located on hidden front walls in my top-down game, since I’m not showing any door meshes or anything, and these hidden doors can be at different angles, so if I just used a plane mesh it wouldn’t work for the shape of the doorway, specially when viewed from different angles.
where would you put a plane that would work for all 3 of them? even if you could move the plane for each case, I don’t think a plane works for each of them individually
also worth noting that this is an “isometric” perspective, not purely isometric, so as the character moves and the camera moves with it, the perspective changes ever so slightly
ideally, regardless of the shape, the final result should look like this:
Right, so the thing is, camera is fixed on this angle. character rotates but the camera stay fixed so it will never be seen from that angle you pointed.
and if it was to rotate, then the hidden walls would be shown (such as is already the case for when there are doors on the opposite, visible walls), and the door mesh would also be visible, eliminating the need for light shafts (which, unlike the first game I showed, my plan is to use them just to represent doors that aren’t visible to the camera). like this, just as an example:
Why not just do it with a gradient map uv’ed on a slightly rounded box
You can pretty much get it running on older hardware. Only downsize is the overdraw cost when many overlap
Ah but that’s just a photoshop representation of what I wanted to achieve
now if I could do that I’d be satisfied. I guess I just need the “front” gradient (the part where the player would “enter” the beam, like the arrow you drew) to be a bigger fade than the other edges
You can’t get gradients from every angle. You would need multiple planes to try to emulate this (sort of like how game dev used to do muzzle flashes).
The problem with this type of multiple planes is that you get massive overdraw which is pretty bad. You also can’t use additive blending because it will exaggerate the visibility of the planes at an off angle.
In a muzzle flash it’s no problem because it’s all bright and glowing. In the case of light shafts they are more subtle.
it kinda works if I round the box’s edges and use a fresnel ramp as opacity, as the first vid posted by ClockworkOcean suggested, along with his method for the front fade.
if I could somehow alter the contrast of the fresnel ramp like I mentioned in my third post, so the round edge of the box which is closest to the camera doesn’t become less transparent than the rest, I guess it would work ok
it’s not ideal sure, a way to make a gradient opacity at the pixel edges of the mesh would be perfect, but idk how any of that would work
