While browsing Twitter, I came across a Tweet showcasing this incredible Unreal Engine 4 dry ice lighting demo that blew my mind. The effect is made possible by something called ray-marching, a volumetric rendering technique that basically injects 2D data into 3D spaces. It's not ray tracing, though; ray tracing only does surfaces. Ray marching essentially passes through the surface data, and is described as the "big brother" of ray tracing. Ray marching is pretty complicated, but here's a nice breakdown.
FluidNinja VFX shows impressive Unreal Engine 4 volumetric lighting demo (video)
Posted on Sunday, April 19 2020 @ 13:57 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Here's an impressive demonstration of the capabilities of FluidNinja VFX, a toolset for Unreal Engine 4. The video clip below shows ray-casted volumetric lighting effects. The demo runs at 182fps in 1920 x 1080 pixels on a system with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 1070 video card, it simulates 3D effects by using shadows and depth tricks. More at TweakTown.