Starting a topic to post the misc things I’m working on, so I’m not creating topics all over the place. Mostly an excuse to post what I’ve been working on for over the past month that I sadly need to shelve for now.
Based off Ryan Brucks’ blog post “Creating a Volumetric Ray Marcher”, I was trying to recreate it in Unity. I understood some of the concepts at a high level, but diving into the methods of implementing it into a shader proved to be extremely difficult (for me).
Got to the point of being able to get absorbance (more opaque at thick areas) working, a volumetric height map based off a texture, and depth sorting with other objects (using a hacky method). Latest I was trying to figure out was converting all my calculations to object space so I could move my “ray march cube” anywhere and still be working. Was getting weird values for my “local” camera position and scene depth so couldn’t get it to work. If I got that working was going to move on to creating a pseudo 3D texture using a flipbook.
Whole thing kicked my butt all over the place! I hadn’t even got to the hard part of lighting, heh. Think I learned some stuff though. I might try to revisit it once I dive into Unreal.
Ray march height map:
Ray march depth sorting:
