Mod Idea - porting volumetric clouds to smoke and fog?

[Guest 3841499]

Mod Idea - porting volumetric clouds to smoke and fog?

How it is volumetric clouds are possible in released W3 build, but volumetric smoke and fog are not?

Without researching to be certain, AFAIK, volumetric smoke/fog simply means smoke/fog that responds to physical surroundings and collides with it. Collision particle effects already exist in Witcher 3 and there is even collision cache file. If some particles already collide with Geralt and other objects, then why can't smoke particles do the same? There is even wind influence that affects smoke and other particles, like Igni sparks.

All that E3 volumetric goodness is probably possible with released build of the game, but we have not figured out how to apply it / make it work. Or is there a definite limitation of the released build that makes any volumetric smoke / fog
​FX not possible?

Side-question: the Aard 360 degree bubble explosion - what is the exact name of it as far as file names go? Is it Super Charge or what? Grass responds and bends when that bubble is cast, but vanilla Aard push does not have the same effect on grass... Can it not be also ported from bubble effect onto regular push effect?

 

[erxv]

first up, there is nothing volumetric or "semi-volumetric" (which is just a conflicting statement on its own) about any of the clouds in witcher 3..... they are all just 2d sprites that face the camera at all times..

collision.cache is a file that contains the collision data for meshes that have collisions... (there is no way to create new collision caches at the moment)

physics interactions on simple spheres and cubes is a lot easier to do than smoke/fog (if you want it to look good)

grass bends on both aards, not hard at all to slow time and take a look with freecam (or go into taller grass)

 

[Guest 3841499]

Hmm.... Can we make a gazillion tiny semi opaque sphere​​ meshes and and make them act like fog?

 

[Guest 3841499]

Maybe The Aard mod messes up grass bending on basic sign level bc the bubble grass bending is very obvious, while basic cast bends nothing...

 

[erxv]

you know you can edit your posts to make them say more than one thing rather than making 2 separate posts....

imagine how those spheres would look.... yeah, they would look like crap.....

 

[Guest 3841499]

So then true volumetric smoke is still a sprite or is it made out of particles? Aren't particles meshes, like tiny sphere meshes I mentioned?

Any there any games that serve as good examples for volumetric smoke / other FX? I only see YouTube tech videos of engines so far...

 

[Guest 2364765]

Volumetric particle systems - by name and definition have volume, which is something that a sprite doesn't have being infinitely thin plane.
And particles aren't meshes (although some engines allow for mesh particles but it's more of an exception than a rule).

Point is that to make a true volumetric smoke you'd need insane amount of particles with collision, which again - for usable purposes is usually hacked around like hairworks having only n% of particles actually simulated while its nearest neighbours follow with interpolated offset.

There aren't many examples of this tech being used since it's heavily circumstantial and much like cloth and hair simulation used to be, still too much of a power hog to be utilized alongside other eyecandies.
Also i'd imagine it's only doable with GPU particles which comes with it's own set of limitations.
Only recent tech that comes to mind that allowed that in real time is NVIDIA Gameworks Turbulence package, which was used in Call of Duty Ghosts for smoke grenades.

 

[Guest 3841499]

That sucks... A bit off-topic, but I thought by now we'd have not only volumetric stuff, but full quality ray tracing. All that recent AI horse race going on and yet today's power GPU's can't handle a lot of available technologies. It is also ironic that the whole AI is related to GPU's and AFAIK running on them?

Anyway, topic closed I guess - no volumetric smoke/fog in W3 possible.

 

[GregorWladacz]

What about fake volumetric fog/clouds and fake volumetric lighting like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Q7B2DT5bY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdaIBKl2DY0

 

[jack91]

For your first video ,just increase bloom fx.

 

[Guest 3841499]

Am I the only one who finds it odd that wind can influence meshes, particles AND 2D smoke sprite textures? If 2D smoke sprite can be influenced by physical effects.like wind, then there is no reason it cannot bounce off other meshes, is there?

What is wind in W3? Is it part of APEX / PhysX? Can it be added to any mesh, like Geralt himself? I could have so much fun with that!!! "Geralt the Feather" or "Geralt the Fairy" drifting in the wind, taking damage from hitting trees in bad weather.

 

[jack91]

You can change that by m_windParams in .env files or .csv files in Cooked\engine\environments

 

[Guest 3841499]

That I know... I was asking something different.

 

[GMSBS_Ghost]

What comes to my mind when thinking about faking volumetric particle effects is this:

Basically applying random rotation, changing size over lifetime of 2d sprite particles and a rather huge amount of particles can create some great looking fake-volumetric effect.

Some of these parameters like "rotation over lifetime", "size over lifetime" and "color over lifetime" actually exist in the game, however I did not find any particle effect that acutally uses them and therefore I couldn't figure out how to include those into existing particle effects...

and btw sorry for calling my mod "Volumetric Clouds over Skellige". At the time I didn't really think much about whether or not the name was accurate and also I guess "2D Sprite Clouds facing the camera to create the illusion of volume - over Skellige" would have been a bit too long .