Attempt of a Nothern Lights with "volumetric" feel - UE4

Personal Work
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#1

Hey there explosions lovers,

This is my first post here, hope I’m doing it right :innocent:

I’m working for some time on a Northern Lights with a volumetric feel. I’ve already worked on this subject some years ago but couldn’t find any convincing way to make it look good.

Some month ago, I found some tutorial to make parallax effect, playing with the camera vector to give a feel of depth in a shader. I wanted to use that on this project and see how it goes.

After some month and a lot of reaserch, I finally managed to do something in Unreal :

I used some HLSL to make a for loop and sample several times an animated texture and offset it to give this fake volumetric effect (so, not sure it’s cheap and game ready… But at least I tried and had fun doing it !)

ArtStation post : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QzQ69B

Don’t hesitate to give your opinion :slightly_smiling_face:

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#2

Great job @Golembok!

They feel really volumetric. Would be great to see those lights with not just green tones but a variety of colors! Also, maybe adding a bit of movement to the light “body” itself on top of the panning texture (or whichever technique you used to animate the lights) would feel great hehehe

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#3

Thank you for your feedback and advices @Lush ! (I’m a big fan of your work)

I wanted to stay sober (maybe too much) and do a basic greenish Northern Lights to work in priority on the behavior. Oh, and I tried a purple one, that I liked a lot, but it was more a magic than a Northern Lights :grin:

I agree that it’s lacking of more noise and motion in the main lines, I’ll see if I can improve it in some days :smiley:

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