07-01-2008, 04:54 PM
Maybe a future FFX enhancement, if no skylight feature can be implemented, could be to add a setting to allow for soft/innaccurate shadows, so we could toss up a simple dome of a few shadow casting lights that wouldn't take too long to render. Even further, separate shadow softness control for each light would be awesome!
Another idea would be something I once did using Afterburn - I created a separate pass where I used white matte spheres locked to each particle where an Aburn puff was and did an AO pass, blurred it, then multiplied it over the smoke, didn't look half bad. Maybe something like that, but from within FFX - so the equivalent would be that FFX computes a rough/soft estimate of the voxels at low quality - maybe even skipping voxels (like a viewport preview), does some type of skylight shadow casting routine, and then multiplies that with the primary render pass.
Just a few thoughts. There's probably more gruvee ideas out there.
Another idea would be something I once did using Afterburn - I created a separate pass where I used white matte spheres locked to each particle where an Aburn puff was and did an AO pass, blurred it, then multiplied it over the smoke, didn't look half bad. Maybe something like that, but from within FFX - so the equivalent would be that FFX computes a rough/soft estimate of the voxels at low quality - maybe even skipping voxels (like a viewport preview), does some type of skylight shadow casting routine, and then multiplies that with the primary render pass.
Just a few thoughts. There's probably more gruvee ideas out there.
BRIAN DEMETZ
Senior Technical Director
Final Light VFX
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Senior Technical Director
Final Light VFX
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