Huge real-time smoke in game egine

[raytheonly]

… but what can I say, I have not seen any such effect in modern games.

Military games are full of them. I especially remember the ones in the Battlefield series, because they look really great. Here you can see a setup they used with such an pillar:

Crafting Environments for Battlefield V with DICE LA

Afaik: They capture a smoke sim as a flipbook with a 6-way “lightmap” and then use particles with those flipbooks.
You can look at this thread on how such an setup works:

6-way lightmap WIP

Update (8/27/18) original post on rotational issue has been solved, and I’m updating my current progress here as opposed to creating a new post. The shader is based off of @Mederic post found here: Smoke Lighting and texture re-usability in Skull & Bones [image] Hey guys, I wanted to share my progress thus far mimicking a fake lighting setup similar to @Mederic’s post on Skull & Bones. I’ve hit a bit of a wall where I don’t know how to get the shader to work with rotation values o…

I can recommend Embergen for realistic smoke, because they can export everything you need at once. If you are using UE4 and want more styalized looking smoke, I can recommend Fluid Ninja.

Another Method would be to use a big mesh with tessellation and animated WPO (just like you’d do it with oceans), if it should look very thick.