[WIP] Volumetric particle shadowing

Community Showcases
1

Here’s the current state of what I’ve got. It’s showing off the particle shadow maps and procedural noise.

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Hey! I’ve been working on a sweet volume shadowing technique based off of: http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/samples/5_Simulations/smokeParticles/doc/smokeParticles.pdf. I’ve put together some shaders and a rendering script for piggybacking off of shuriken for the actual particle physics. the hardest part was actually getting the particle sorting to perform reasonably well, I went as far as implementing my own GPGPU radix sort in a compute shader (what a nightmare).

here’s a video:

does this seem like something you guys would be interested in buying on the asset store? It’s pretty much going to be DX11 only, so that’s a major limitation I expect. It performs reasonably well, taking about 3 ms on my gtx780. It could definitely be optimized more.

what do you guys think?

2

I’m not sure how useful an effect like this would be on its own, but it’s a nice effect. :slight_smile:

I suppose natural partners for this sort of thing would be other DX11 restricted assets, like TrueSky, Jove 2.0, or TC Particles.

3

I’m probably not showing it off well enough. I think it has a ton of potential, when I first saw it on the nvidia smoke demo it blew me away.

4

Here’s an update: I’ve moved on to a different technique, one that is a bit more stable than the one I mentioned in the first post, and it should also potentially allow for multiple light sources. I’ve based this technique off the slides here: https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/BAVOIL_ParticleShadowsAndCacheEfficientPost.pdf

Here’s a video:

5

This looks great! Really nice effect.

6

Any more progress on this?

7

Yeah, I’m still working on it. there’s a few options I have: I can put it on the asset store after a little more polish, and it will use Unity’s built in shuriken stuff for everything, and will be pretty slow for large particle systems (30 fps for 50k particles on my machine, because it requires sorting for rendering) or I can delay for a while longer and get my GPU sorting working so it can handle larger particle systems much more quickly. the disadvantage of using a GPU sort is that you have to draw the particles manually now, which means I have to replicate much of shuriken’s functionality (though it still uses shuriken for particle positions).

8

Here’s another video:

. It’s a bit long but it shows off a lot of cool effects you can accomplish with the technique. You don’t have to watch the whole thing, but skip around to see the general possibilities. I’ve integrated some procedural noise to get all the cool particle animations.

1 Like
9

Nice work! :slight_smile:
But one thing that would be cool to see is something like this, which takes into account scattering as well!

10

I’m not actually familiar with this technique, but it seems somewhat similar, though I’ll need to read the whitepaper to see if it’s compatible or too performance heavy. I do agree that scattering would be cool though!

11

I agree, scattering would really seal the deal :slight_smile: here’s a link
http://jmarvie.free.fr/Publis/2011_SIGGRAPH_ASIA/extinctionTransmittanceMaps.pdf

12

Nice, I’ll take a look at it, but, of course, I can’t promise anything.

13

How’s everything goin with this?

14

Collision with characters or environement would bring this volumetric particle lot of potential.

15

Very interesting post, definitely an asset store buy, if price will be reasonable and with good instructions…

16

Any chance you can record a couple different versions of your work but more like one long music video? (Kind of joking but not really. You need to do this.)

17

Hi, any news on this project ?
I’m working since some years on something looking similar, but with a totaly different approach (no dx11) : look for “puffy smoke” on the asset store…
I’m interested by your progresses, because I’ve planned to try exactly the same thing for my version 2 :wink:
Maybe we could share some tips or work on something together.
(you can find my thread here : Puffy Smoke - Particles with a volumetric look - Community Showcases - Unity Discussions)

1 Like
18

Hi, i´ve seen that you know how to make particle shaders, i only want to ask you if you can make a particle shader that can cast shadows? the unity standard particle shader is kinda weird, shadows doesnt work properly, thanks in advance.