Hi there. It’s another one of those ‘graphics guy asks programming stuff he doesn’t know’ topics.
I was playing through F.E.A.R. 2 lately and I’m pretty impressed with their volumetric lighting. They already had that in the first game but in the second it just looks fantastic. So I was wondering how they do it?
My personal approach to that so far was modeling planes and using an alpha texture (like so) with a particle material. It looks pretty good but loses some of its magic if the player gets to close because the polygons clip near the camera.
So I was thinking: could a modified Fur shader be used to create volumetric lights? I mean - basically all it does is duplicate the texturealonge the normals in a regular offset. It doesn’t look good any more if the spacing between the planes is too far away.
Also in its current state the planes are only visible with the normals facing towards the camera. The backside isn’t visible (which is fine for dense fur but doesn’t work for volumes). But other than that it kinda does the trick already …
Anyone have an idea how it’s done in FEAR or someone wiling to share their thoughts on the topic? How do you do volume lights?
