Hi guys,

what is the best way in 4.0 to make stuff that gives off its own light? For instance, in space scenes having that rocket exhaust glow or “plasma” type weapons. Or for something more ordinary like a lantern?

there is a demonstration of this in the 3.6.0 examples called Advanced_MultiPassLantern.

thanks, oladitan. Yeah I’ve seen that demo, but I’m wondering how best to do it in 4.0. I’ll have a look at it again and see if it applies.

In a more general sense, I’m curious how to do volumetric light effects in 4.0. Stuff like seeing the beam of a spot light

I have not tired this is away 3D but have you considered using a mesh shape, like a cone or something, with a low opacity texture, and maybe a blur effect to make it look like volumetric light? I was listening to some commentary on the movie “final fantasy spirits within” and I remember hearing this technique. wikipedia has some good info on this method if you search “volumetric lighting”.

yes indeed. this kind of thing:

http://www.art-head-start.com/tutorial-3d-volumetric-light.html

Possible lead…

I was excited to see the addition of “god rays” in a recent GitHub update, though I haven’t seen an example using it yet.
https://github.com/jalava/away3d-core-fp11/blob/master/src/away3d/filters/RadialBlurFilter.as

Hmmm, a radial blur filter isn’t quite like god rays though. I did see this radial blur filter in the LoaderMD5Test example, but I don’t think it’s what you’re looking for.

I suppose volumetric lighting is sort of the opposite of shadow volumes which can be tricky to compute in real time.

—Apprentice

nice find, Pete. It’s going to be something along those lines I think. Now how to make it work around the shape of a set of dynamically generated clouds. I’ve faked this kind of stuff in Flash 2D, but a real 3D approach would be great