Six Point Light - Fog
Six Point Light setup in Unreal Engine 5.
A six point light setup is a technique used to create the illusion of depth and volume on 2D surfaces. This is acheived by baking light information into textures.
Houdini
The cloud was created using a Volume VOP in Houdini, primarily by layering noise patterns. The lighting setup in Houdini was rendered with Karma. I haven't worked much with Houdini, but through research and tutorials, I was able to achieve the result I was aiming for.
The outcome is two textures containing lighting information from six different angles. In the shader I compare the separate channels to the Directional Light vector.
I reused this procedural fog/cloud setup for game projects and other portfolio pieces at TGA.
Flowmaps
To add subtle, organic movement to the fog, I integrated a flowmap into the shader. This allowed me to use a higher resolution for the fog texture.
The flowmap is handpainted using Flow Map Generator / Visualizer.
If I had more time…
…I would increase the functionality of this shader by integrating support for custom lights and shadows. However, this process took way longer than anticipated, and I ran out of time. Currently, the shader supports the directional light but does not include shadows.
The building-models I used in this project is made by Sergey Tyapkin.