Simple Volumetric Lighting Solutions

noFilter (3) New Project - 2024-07-01T180636.176 > Sparkk


Simple Volumetric Lighting Solutions


Voxel Lighting Based Lighting:

Voxel Based Volumetric Lighting is created with Particles, particles do not support future lighting so they are voxel lighting based. When aligned in a 3d grid your get volumetric lighting that is similar to most high efficiency volumetric lighting engines such as VOLUMIKA. This method is the simplest of the bunch as it needs little to no optimization as Roblox does it for you.

Example of Voxel Lighting volumetric lighting.

Sources: [1] [2]


Shadow Map + Future Lighting Based Lighting:

Volumetric Lighting with future and shadow map lighting uses Billboard GUI’s, billboard gui’s have the ability to use sharper lighting that does not involve voxel lighting. Using the same 3d grid, these types can have a sharper edge and look more realistic in comparison. Looking better does come at a cost, having hundreds of billboard gui’s causes more lag than particles. Overall you will need to optimize this method in some suboptimal ways. Another downside to this method is that there is less documentation on it.


Example of Future lighting volumetric lighting.

Sources: [1]


Closing Statements:

This information should be enough to get you started with volumetric lighting. To make a 3d grid of particles or billboard guis I recommend using attachments that are evenly spaced apart.


noFilter (3) New Project - 2024-07-01T180636.176 > Sparkk

35 Likes

dude why you gotta leak the billboard method :sob::sob:

7 Likes

I believe that gatekeeping information is hurting the community in general, though I am not the first person to talk about billboards on the devforum.

Sources: [1] [2] [And more]

11 Likes

no way he leaked an instance :hushed:

11 Likes

i feel like gatekeeping is only a bad thing based on the impact of said information being released
(and to be honest volumetric lighting and fog assets have been gatekeeped for a while anyway)
personally ive never really had any reason to release any of my assets, so id be open to hear any major reasons for releasing stuff in general

3 Likes

no more “professionalism”

the reason I am telling people about this is because I’m not an asshole who gatekeeps information just to hold the community back.

Tell me one case were gatekeeping has helped anyone but an individual who profits of it?
Even one of my primary sources gatekeeps many ideas as (who would have guessed) they were selling a plugin at the bottom for $50?!

And the worst part of it all is that nobody explains how lights work and many people believe that particles are the only way because of it.

10 Likes

there’s a third, older solution that used a large mesh(es) at a high transparency that basically had volume with its number of noise triangles

3 Likes

Yes I did not mention that one as it is, well, laggy lol (20fps with high quality meshes)

2 Likes

keeping stuff you’ve found yourself, to yourself isnt holding an entire community back, its just having something you found.
I have made a module that replicates metatables, and if i saw someone struggling with something of the sort, yeah I would help them, but I wouldnt just go and post my whole module.
and dont take what i say the wrong way, i dont mean like, if someone asks like “how do i make a field of view for an npc?” i dont think you should just go
“i know it, but i dont really care.”
no, thats really just not cool, but just keeping certain techniques or assets you’ve made or found,
I dont think theres much detriment to that unless it would shake the whole landscape as we know it.

a case of good gatekeeping? how about if a government officials files are leaked and the person that finds them doesnt sell them? or if a roblox password is compromised, (which honestly probably happens on a minutely basis) the hacker doesnt sell it or use it and just keeps it to themself or deletes it?

if you want to open stuff you find to everyone, thats cool and all, idm.
im just saying that when it comes to doing that, its just more of a choice. it shouldnt be something your pressured to do.

and as for: “nobody explains how lights work” … when it comes to stuff like this, you can usually find explanations. you just have to look a little harder.

3 Likes

I think you forgot the main idea of the statement, people don’t understand, or at least the average person how light work on particles vs. billboard guis.

buddy acting like I started this all :slight_smile: “dude why you gotta leak the billboard method”

EDIT: and people would rather have a primary source than multiple sources that can take hours to piece together

2 Likes

its cool for people to have that information available, but its good for people to experiement.
while having information infront of you is nice, experimenting gives the more concrete information you can hold rather than seeing it on google or sum :skull::skull:
example: its clear you dont like gatekeeping, however I was able to make this with only what was available and what i could learn:

open information is all good (like i said its a choice to open it) but experimentation yields something you can understand deeper. information should be the base to your own findings in the long run.

cranking up particle emitter settings to the absolutely RIDICULOUS numbers can slowly-to-lightly simulate shadows. how did i find that out? experimentation. i had been doing research on light on roblox for days and never found that out until i had tried myself. (using information i had already learned myself from similar experiments) tinkering around with something you want to learn more about can be very benefitial, and i believe it can be extra benefitial with base information, but you should learn as you do it.

dude, no. you just took a light reply more seriously than i had wrote it.

4 Likes

Open information makes it easier to experiment, I only really mentioned 2 instances, no code, no settings. Edit: also do you think getting people started with a topic shows them not to experiment? I mean you practically told everyone more about how it works in a literal sense then I did?

2 Likes

Eltobb uses the voxel lighting one with particles.

Imma just be honest though, $50 is a scam for a lackluster plugin as seen in the 2 reviews posted on yt, without using his blog post it is actually really easy to get it up and running.

8 Likes

Trying to make a texture that blends perfectly and doesn’t band is really something I’ve been wasting time on when I made my own particle emitter based froxel host. I did manage to get a nice result out of this, but I can tell why its even 50$ to start with. It’s still a huge chunk and was far outside my budget, which is why I even started to make my own solution in the first place (no offense! the solutions Elttob provides are really nice, e.q being Fusion or Relight, along with Access Anywhere)

Though while I was looking at other volumetric lighting solutions, I thought of using beams, since I figured out they produce sharp shadows and can act as froxel host pretty well.

BUT.

FOR SOME REASON, external light sources DO NOT project onto beams when using Future lighting. This got me disappointed because in a FiB build, beams could be illuminated by basically any light source, be it external or sun light. But now, this isn’t the case anymore. They just don’t get illuminated in Future lighting through point lights, spot lights, and neither surface lights, with the only exception being sun light. Here’s how it’d look like if Roblox kept this a feature:


source video of where i took it from: https://youtu.be/lzCtiX7phfg

I’m not even sure if this is a bug or just yet another arbitrary limitation imposed on us, but for now, particle emitter froxels is a go compared to all other methods. There might be some another solution hiding, it’s just that we have to dig deeper on what we can find.

1 Like