Ancestors

Toot

Written by Frame of Mind on 2024-09-16 at 16:00

For our first #gamedev spotlight, let's look at fairy lights in #FrameOfMind

Let's first establish tree facts of game development:

1. Light Soruces are expensive, especially many tiny lights.

2. bloom is expensive and usually done using a down-scaled image that will not include small light sources.

3. really small meshes can cause rendering artefacts with anti-alazing

So ... why do these lights work in #godotengine?

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Descendants

Written by Frame of Mind on 2024-09-16 at 16:02

1.They actually do not cause lighting.

There is just a very large and very diffuse point light in the general vicinity of the lights that make it seem as if they are illuminating the room (made it blue so you can better see it.)

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Written by Frame of Mind on 2024-09-16 at 16:04

2. Their bloom is not screen space based, but mesh based.

It uses a mesh dome that wraps around the light and a fresnel effect, that fades the lights visibility out towards the edges.

You could create a similar effect with just just a billboard sprite, but I like how I can make this effect more directional (lights that shine at you have a brighter bloom) and it creates an illusion of caustics, when the bloom mesh clips into a wall.

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Written by Frame of Mind on 2024-09-16 at 16:05

3. Lastly, I use a LineRenderer3D for the cables.

This one you probably would have guessed if you dipped your toe into game devvelopment and while being on the subject: Check out the LineRendering AddOn I contributed to Godot!

https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/2563

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