Hello.
I am making a submarine game with windows out into the underwater environment.
Should I use volumetric and exponential height fog or should I use translucent shaders in the window materials to give the look of underwater?
I am aiming for smooth running on laptops with integrated gpu’s so I would like do determine the most efficient method.
I am using UE5.6
Thanks for any help…
those are 2 different things. yes… you probably should use fog to limit the view distance. and yes you should use some form of glass material. refraction is probably cheaper than translucent. but both render after the base pass. so… the level of performance hit is similar. you could also stencil the glass surfaces and add a water “distortion” in the post processing stage.
Thanks for the quick reply. Actually refraction/distortion is not an issue because it cannot be perceived when the window is entirely submerged, which it is. Another detail with Exp. Height Fog is that the volumetric part has to be switched off and handed over to boxes with volumetric fog and the fog start distance has to be set beyond the possible distance from player to window. This is so that there is no fog inside the room.
The Window materials put the material complexity off the scale. There are three materials but I think I can trim these down to one material. I downloaded the windows, but I think they are more for demo and not play.
I think I will follow your intuition. I’ll keep both a bit but optimize them both. I’ll simplify the window and turn down the fog scalability setting to 1…
I’d go with exponential height fog + simple underwater effects. Volumetric fog looks nice but can be expensive on integrated GPUs. Keep the window material mostly opaque and use it only for tint/distortion. Profile both options, but the fog approach will likely run better.
