Volumetric Shader Using RayMarching

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In an attempt of creating Realistic looking Nebula for my game, I was studying about Raymarching for a while, and how we can implement it in unreal. I was looking into Ryan Bruck’s awesome work and progress on this for volumetric clouds generation, and got a chance to play around with custom developed raymarching shader for about a week, but my main focus has been to generate a Nebula and not a clouds.

So I created a noise material that provides texture sheets of 16x16. I am baking the texture sheet as render target, and feeding the render target in a materila to create PseudoVolume Texture. Then with density raymarching I created volums that is fixed inside a given bound, and I added tweakable parameters that let me customize properties like color, density , shadow, threshold, etc.

I created this thread to share my updates as I progress. Showing few snapshots of very early prototype of my work so far.

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WIP - Mesh to Volume Converter.

This is an early demonstration of the tool I am working on that would convert any static mesh into volumetric texture sheet, which can then be used for Volume Rendering. I believe this will greatly aid in defining the shapes of the Nebula via static meshes.

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Working on Custom Perlin Worley Noise generation system that would let me define the shape of the volume

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Added Billowy effect to the custom Perlin Worley noise to make more cloud like structure. Result looks promising.