Picture the scene: A forest with a certainly level of localised fog. Sunlight streaming through the trees, and, (assuming no wind) projecting the light onto the ground. Sounds lovely doesn''t it? The first two ''effects'' will be simple enough, but I''m looking for a easy and non-extention based way to simulate the streams of light though the foggy air. Any thoughts?

Yeah, that would look great!

I'm not sure how to do it, but have a look around here:

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/showfaq.asp?forum_id=12

Might be some interesting articles somewhere...

You should really try posting this in the Graphics Programming and Theory forum, you will get much better annswers from there...


[edited by - James Trotter on April 23, 2003 12:41:40 PM]

For the sun-rays perhaps you could draw the rays as a solid ray in the stencil buffer, then draw the fog/mist again (though now only drawing it where the rays were "drawn"), but draw the fog then in a bright orangy-yellow color. That would look especially cool if the fog was dynamic with twists and curls... Just an idea, though.

--- Alex Broadwin
--- Domini Nocti Games

Cheers James Trotter, I actaully spent the afternoon looking through that page. The section on sky refraction was too much about ray-tracing and very accurate, heavy computationally complicated maths.

I''m not after any where near that level of sophistication or complexity. An approximation will be what I''m after.

Something like (what I''d imagine anyway) would be kind of like shadow volumes combined with a ''light volume''. Forgive my ignorance on this as I''m finding it hard to know what to search on google for.

I''m sure you can all imagine a given shaft of light that is split up on intersection of other objects. Maybe I''m looking to go too complicated, and should just consentrate on getting solid shafts of light looking good on it''s own.

Ok, it''s not a direct solution, but I found a good-sized PDF on exactly the theory I was looking for.
It''s reading time.