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Basic lightening shadows option for particles


YouGroove
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Hi,

 

If particles would had that option we could choose it for a fast lightening approximation on their vertex polygons, it would look lot better for particles needing to be influenced by lithening and shadows.

 

particles.jpg

 

 

It would look approximatively like that

particlesshadow.jpg

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We would have two options :

-simple vertex lit and shadow lit on rectangular polygons,it's very lightweight.

-per pixel lit and shadow more expensive indeed, it's up to you to see when to use it : main big smoke effects on a scene for example.

 

If you have the option to switch the lightening in real time from pixel to vertex, you could also use some LOD for particles.

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I believe each particle is a billboard of 4 vertices, and they are rendered without depth, so that would not be possible?.

Just create your own emitter using instanced boxes/spheres and they would follow the same rules as a normal entity.

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It's more workflow work around : you need to create a box with only one face having a texture of smoke for example, and other faces with full transparency texture ottherwise it will look strange.

 

This don't works, the material applied to a wall accepts lightening, while applied to a particle emitter lightening has no effect on it.

post-3271-0-83864000-1425167873_thumb.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

FYI, if you use the shade blend mode you will get a more natural particle appearance that blends into the scene better than self-illuminating stuff.

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+1 what Josh said..blending would be best approach all around..eventually, you could extract from generated shadowmap, every point in the room and do a light visibility precomputed and stored in a volumetric data. This way you only need a simple texture lookup to determine the amount of light that hits the any dynamic geometry. On this way you get cheap and fast soft shadows for free over any form of dynamic geometry, including particle, of course, provided that you do not move or manipulate light, otherwise you have to recompute volume again..

 

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And there's the problem the volume would consume a lot of memory and only work for a small area. So if you put a lot of effort in you could set up a special effect for one little area, but I tend to not like "fake" effects that require special setup like that.

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..well..i was pointing on small area, which would be related to particular effect..some sort of sampling should be utilized as well, to scale down amount of volume data stored in case larger area is needed to be covered, so lighting result will not be 100% accurate but it will be good enough and fast enough...

 

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The problem there is your particles are pure black, so they just darken everything to black. If they were lighter they would have a less extreme effect and you would see some variation.

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