Why are my light shafts flickering on/off at certain angles?

Development Rendering
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1

When I rotate the camera or the view port the entire lightshaft/god ray just pops in and out of existence with no warning or no fading… It’s making it impossible to render out videos of our scenes because these things are just suddenly appearing and disappearing.

http://i.imgur.com/k6wht3a.jpg - You can see in these two shots that my distance to them is the same, I just angle the viewport up ever so slightly and then bam, there’s a god ray… Angle it back down by 1-2 degrees and it’s gone.

You can see the issue happening in real time here: - YouTube and - YouTube

I’ve played with the following:
Sprite Bounds
Scale
Animated material on/off
double sided
cranked up the fade distance
increased the length

EDIT: I tried dragging a new godray BP into the scene, same BP as these ones are using and it doesn’t have this problem… I migrated the BP from the effects cave in to try those and again they work fine… For some reason it’s only the existing ones that we originally setup in this scene that have somehow become broken in this way. I mean at least I can redo them and fix the issue but it would be great if it didn’t happen in the first place :slight_smile:

2

Hey Ironbelly -

This looks like a bounds issue, where the bounds of the various rays are coming in and out of the camera frustum. You mention that you adjusted the sprite bounds, did you adjust or change BPs bounds? It may also have to do with the Z Sort Order for the Translucent Material and teh bounds of another object coming between the bounds of the light beam and the camera frustum (shown more in the second video than the first.) If that is the case you can set the light beams to render at a higher Translucent Sort Priority, but I feel pretty strongly that the issue has more to do with a bounds check in your map.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum