I have been reading about ways of accomplishing volumetric lighting. It seems there are two ways. The cheap way of creating a mesh with transparency and matching the mesh to the shaft of light and creating god rays which require good hardware. There is not a lot of detail on creating god rays and the threads are all old. Anybody have a good way to create volumetric light? I have a completely dark scene and all the particles show up even without light. I need a good way to see the shapes of the lights as they are moving that looks good when you walk through them. I can try god rays if nothing else but I can't find enough detail on how to do them.
There seems to be a lot of activity in the light volumes department so it would not surprise me if there is a good solution shader around the corner. For now I think the standard mesh method and glow effect or custom god ray post effect are the main staple. The glow post effect reacts to alpha channel intensity in the scene where by black blocks and white glows, so tou could ensure the alpha channel of your volume mesh is right up there. See the thread Post Process Godrays
You could fake it with this generator. There is no light source required, has preset shapes and you can load in your own mesh data (mesh won’t be used in game so no drawcall for that, it extracts the vertex positions) for custom casting shapes