Creating Volumetric Lighting

Hey! I’ve been looking around a bit and learned that it is possible to create volumetric lighting, and different approaches make for different styles of lighting. Currently Roblox does not have built-in crepuscular rays OTHER than sun rays. I want to mimic volumetric lighting but from what I’ve seen there’s not a lot of information out there, and a lot of the information uses things like billboard GUI or parts. One good example is Volumetric Light Effect. While using beams makes a nice aesthetic, it unfortunately uses ShadowMap and causes poor performance on lower-end devices (props off to
HeyItzDaredevil
as they created a very good mimic).

What would be the best method to create some nice rays that don’t look like transparent parts & don’t crash toasters?

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So I did some more research and it seems as though there’s not much we can do besides parts or beams. Future Is Bright: Phase 1 Released - #134 by plasma_node explains why.

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Hey, thanks for linking my post. Just wanted to pop in and say I’m pretty sure this trick doesn’t work the same anymore even with the new Future lighting (at least with the billboard GUI version, though I think the same happens with beams). I believe this is because they changed how light interacts with objects.

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I was told that this possibly works with ShadowMap, but I cannot for the life of me figure out where and how to place the beams. Do I just place them over the lights or across the screen? Do I change opacity or position? I think that this could be toyed with a lot more and changed to recreate it, but there’s virtually almost no information that I can get on this. As someone who was able to create this, how would I go about this? Thanks for replying!

EDIT: I looked a little further and just saw your diagram

How close to the camera does it need to be and how many would I need?
I also want to use beams so should I use multiple beams per layer? or just 50-1000 layers?

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I just kinda played around a bit, and while I definitely messed something up with the beams, it does create rays.

ShadowMap:


Future:

My apologies for not updating this in a while, but I did it. I know very little about roblox’s lighting, and learned a lot about FiB, other versions of volumetric lighting, and that there’s 0 information on it. I hope that by making this post I can help others create their own versions of volumetric lighting. I will be making a community tutorial on this so that you can do it for yourself.

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I did it! Here’s the link to the plugin: Volumetric Lighting Plugin [NO LONGER UPDATING] [OMG PLEASE STOP USING]

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