I wanted to have visible godrays in my hero asset room that would be visible from far away. I set up a node tree and created a basic texture to plug in. I firstly tried setting up a branch to control the angle of the plane, so that it would always face the player perspective. I then made another branch to control the opacity and the rate of appearing/fading.
The basic plane I made in 3Ds Max would act ass the godray, and would be angled down from the windows.
However, I wasn't happy with how it looked. The godrays didn't fade naturally enough despite altering the settings, and the edges were too sharp. I thought about using a different method.
The next method was to use the directional light to cast godrays. Although I increased the level of bloom, the rays weren't visible, and making the light too intense made the room to blindingly bright.
Therefore I experimented with height fog, and volumetric fog. I didn't want the room to look unnaturally foggy so I preferred to use the height fog, so that the fog would only subtly hit the floor. I turned on volumetric lighting and shadows, and the results were clear godrays coming from a more natural position.
I played around with the settings a lot until I was happy with the results.
I also played around with the skylight cubemap, using a free HDRI of a warmly lit golden interior to suit the evnvironment of the palace.
I adjusted the reflectivity sphere so that the reflections weren't so bright.
One last thing I played around with was creating an area of fog using particle effects. Although I didn't end up using this, I thought it was a valueable experiment nonetheless as I could place fog in certain areas while excluding it from others.
Overall, I was pleased with the volumetric lighting effects I created. It add more realism to my level and helped to enhance mood.
No comments:
Post a Comment