So you think all modern computer games actually use particles for fire? You thought that haze around lights always consists of a post processing shader?
He does some nice breakdowns of fire from ‘next gen’ engines, of, well, the ways game companies have figured out for making really good looking things in a minimal amount of time with a minimal requirement in resources…
My favourite?
This sphere:
Is actually a flat disk with a stretched UV map and (a few) UV scroll(s):
This blog has gone down into my bookmarks folder for future reference, and I think you’ll find some surprising things there.
Sadly I haven’t quite got the motivation to write a shader to do that.
However I did find that it works well with mixing normal maps for making nice water:
I may see if theres any others which can be adapted to blender or which have similar implementations which could be useful.
Actually I realized that I’ve read this blog several times before, but forgot about it, or didn’t go to the main blog (the lego tank tracks and the Homeworld backgrounds were two that I’ve read before).
I’ve been having so much fun with this trying to make some of the tricks work in blender. My best success so far was with (pseudo-volumetric) shaded smoke:
(The effect really shows best when lit from beneath)
Simply use a sphere type normal map unwrapped to a UV layer on all your smoke particles. Here’s a texture I found and adapted (it had to be flipped to work with blender):
I’ll continue to look through and post any good stuff I find.
