Working on the Volumetric Nebula plugin for last few months. This has been a challenging but equally rewarding journey for me as learning Raymarching has opened so much possibilities into the kind of things I am planning to build for my game. Initially I was completely depending on materials to create the Volume Noise Texture Sheets, but recently I switched to Compute Shaders for the same, and significant improvement of the performance has greatly sped up my development process
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCRVCw_qsYo
Features included -
- Custom tweakable Noise functions to define shape of the volume.
- Combining multiple noise layers
- Gradient based Color curve and Point lights to colorize the volume.
- Custom spherical mask
- Combining multiple volume bounds to create a larger area for the Nebula.
- Density Volume Shaders which uses Raymarching to create the Volumetric Output.
Additional Features to be implemented
- Custom Art Directed Noise Shape for Non Rectangular Volume Bounds.
- Mesh to Volume Converter, to create Volume mask out of any static or skeletal mesh, to have a base layer to apply the Noise on.
- More Light type Support.
4.Optimizations to support a large number of Volumes in a scene. - Converting Volume to baked static textures for distant Nebula, to save on performance.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated. I am deeply inspired by cinematic qualities of MCU movies, and some of the space shots in films like Thor and Guardian of the Galaxy series help me envision the scope of this project. My target quality benchmark is something similar to the end credit scene of Thor ( 2011 )
This is primarily made for the introductory space scene of the dark fantasy game I am building.
