Unity developer showcases mesmerizing volumetric fog effect for upcoming game

Alexey Testov continues to impress the gaming community with technical solutions for his game. Last year, the developer attracted attention with a lighting shader and weather system, and now demonstrated a beautiful pseudo-volumetric fog effect in screen space. Despite the solution working only from one perspective, the result looks spectacular.

The developer wrote:

Essentially, technically it's a fairly simple effect, especially considering the camera in my game doesn't rotate, which eliminates about 90% of the complexity. The fog distribution map renders to a render texture and is controlled by multiple parameters like current humidity, wind speed, time of day, and so on, so weather affects the fog. This map then projects onto the world in the same direction as the camera view.

To create moving "fog clouds," the developer uses a terrain height texture and erases portions of the fog based on elevation. This keeps ground fog dense near the surface and completely disappears at heights of several meters.

That's the foundation. On top of this I add layers of noise, lighting reactions, and various artistic settings, but that's mostly just coloring the base effect.

Follow the development on Alexey's X page.