More Volumes!

A continuation of the volume research I have been doing.

So, within the first blog post about volumes, I was able to set out a good structure within which further volume development could be made. By continuing on with this, I intend to use noise parameters as well as other mathematical formula to continue on the journey towards realistic volumes for clouds and most other gaseous meshes. 

To do this I will take the work done in the last post and expanded further. This will be through a few different methods but the main one that I will use to author my own pseudo volume texture in a flipbook format will be through using a divisible noise parameter to affect the spherical volume generated in the last blog. On top of this, I hope to accurately demonstrate the colour variation that can be made through importing arbitrary values into the blueprint written for the main volume texture. 

So, Let's Begin by creating a blueprint in which the code to create the volume textures noise parameters will be set within. This blueprint will consist of a mass of different mass but using the valuable nodes given to us through unreal Engine no code will be written, instead all of the coding will be done will be through the graph-based Node system through the Blueprint Editor of Unreal Engine. 



We can see in this screenshot, the finished graph that was made. This is actually way simpler than I thought it could be but by using some smart optimisation Tactics I was able to bring the workload way down. The outcome of this was a very simple idea. This was that I was going to be able to create a widget or tool of some sort that would go within the blueprint so that it could allow for Fast and responsive creation of volumetric materials. This is pretty much only good for clouds as the variation often makes the direction and the action of the volume fairly stagnant. I decided to use a small diamond-shaped wireframe as the widget for the volume controller. This was so that all the changes that were made were easy to visualise and also would be easy to handle as a widget on the screen.


Here we can see a screenshot of the noise that it admits on to the volume. This black square at the bottom is simply a visualisation of the flipbook texture and is not visible during gameplay but I thought it would be a useful bit of imagery to see where the noise was being created and how it was being created. This next image is exactly the same but with the Node used for handling the noise visible on the screen.


This blueprint works absolutely fine and I'm incredibly happy with the result. It seems to create very realistically and good-looking visuals for any kind of gameplay that would require some clouds to be volumetric rear-ended instead of having a 2D texture printed on a space far enough away from the player to make it appear as 3D. This work is something that I will continue to work on him Picchu as I feel as though it is widely left out of a lot of amateur gameplay development.


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