Ben Burkart

Update 1.5 for Apex Volumetrics has been submitted to Epic should be going live in next 48 hours! Please read carefully as this is a massive update that changes many things! Features: Fog Spline Actors: These essentially place fog points along a spline allowing rivers of flowing fog, chimney smoke, and more! All features from fog points fully work on new fog splines as well including all gameplay interaction, time of day, animating etc... - Fog splines also provide albedo color/self shadow color, density, and scale by life allowing splines to transition between scale, density, and color smoothly over the length of the spline. - Both density and color by life settings on splines also have falloff settings allowing users to control how sharp of a falloff the various color/density values transition over the spline. - Fog Splines also provide ability for closed splines for full circular spline shapes. - Fog Splines have adaptive billowing that allows billow settings to auto adapt to scaling over spline life. - Fog Splines are highly performant only rendering the small sections of the spline that are actually on screen with each piece properly handling distance, frustum, and occlusion culling. - Fog Splines can be snapped to the ground automatically to help make rivers of flowing fog or other ground conforming fog easier. Lighting/Shadowing: - Increasing shape radius will now properly increase shadowing. Large rectangular/capsule shapes will properly shade inner parts depending on how thick the shape is and if the thin/thick parts are rotated towards the sun. For example, a thin rectangle shape with the thinner side facing the sun will have almost no self shadowing if its thin enough, take that same thin shape and rotate it so the thicker length is facing the sun and it will still get a thicker shadow since the shape has more distance to travel through. - Shadowing will grow thicker as density increases and mostly go away when density values are low. - Billowing shapes inwards, fog power, and all other values that push shape thickness inwards so that fog is less thick will automatically cause fog to shadow less. - New default settings have been set on master blueprint for albedo self shadowing to better fit new lighting. - To enable new HQ shadows toggle "Enable HQ Shadows" on BP_VolumetricFog_Master actor. - Default LQ shadow path got a massive upgrade on visuals and still performs the same inner self shadowing but with a lot more depth. - LQ shadow path now also automatically increases self shadowing based on fog density/shape scale/ fog power etc... - Massive GPU optimizations, even with all improvements to visuals and added features the HQ shadow path now roughly the same cost as the previous version, LQ path looks vastly better than previous version and performs much better! - HQ shadow path performs anywhere from 10% worse to 40% better than version 1.21 depending on your scene. - LQ shadow path performs roughly 17% to 47% better than version 1.21 depending on your scene. Bug Fixes: - Fix for fog point 207/256 taking in a wrong value. - Fixed a regression that caused fog points to not disappear when deleted in editor. - Fixed demo characters shots not cutting fog when shot traces hit nothing. Updated demos in comments.

Pushing out a large update for Apex Volumetrics, will go live as soon as Epic approves it (usually within 24-48 hours) Full patch notes below! Features: - Large GPU optimization, 10-35% better GPU performance depending on how your environment is setup. - Large CPU optimization, when gameplay/player interactions are enabled. - GPU Optimization when gameplay/player interactions are enabled. - Cut draw calls by half, each fog point now a single draw call. - Lots of general CPU improvements. - Added new setting on fog point actors called "Can Animate During Gameplay" You will need to toggle this per fog point to animate them dynamically during gameplay. This is an optimization so that when "Allow Animating Fog Values In Game" is enabled on the master blueprint its only updating points that will actually be animated and ignore static ones. - Added new setting on BP_VolumetricFog_Master actor called "Volumetric Fog History Weight" to provide more control over responsiveness/jittering of fog values. Bug Fixes: - Fixed fog point 208/256 having a wrong value that caused it not to render. - Fixed gameplay interaction hitscan injections being longer than they should be. (Only on demo prototype asset). Updated demos available in the comments!

In depth feature/performance video for Apex Volumetrics covering most of the features the pack come with in more detail as well as some important performance information!

Apex Volumetrics will be by far the most feature rich and most performant volumetric system ever created for Unreal Engine. Features: -Hand place fully customizable volumetric points -Full gameplay implementation, full 3D player paths, bullets create paths, grenades clear fog etc... -Each fog point has full frustum, distance, and occlusion culling -Overlap and stack fog points as much as you want with literally zero overdraw -Does NOT require distance fields to work, just enable volumetric fog and you're good to go! -Mix and match 4 unique fog noise values together to blend and sculpt each fog point uniquely -All fog self shadows in the direction of the sun, values fully adjustable -Landscape conforming fog with day/night adjustable heights/densities -Fully adjustable mid air light rays (Without shadow casting objects) -Full time of day support for transitioning values (Dense fog at night, no/less fog in day, height values, etc.) -Sphere fog points provide infinite distance representations so fog can render at any distance -Fog gives artists full control over color, self shadowing color, wind direction, fog scale, time of day values, and much more -No size limitations to how large or small fog points can be -Multiple fog shapes from cubes, rectangles, spheres, capsules -All fog points can be cut in half with adjustable heights and billowing along cut edges -All fog points allow fully unique wind speed/directions and fog noise shape/scales, mix and match at no extra cost -Use fog points to remove fog inside interior spaces such as buildings/caves -Fog points have vortex wind mode for allowing shapes to spin tornado style Apex Volumetrics is releasing on Fab Marketplace September 1. I will be releasing another video covering features and performance on release day but until then feel free to check out the playable tech demos in the comments below!

Announcing Apex Volumetrics for UE5! 🌫️✨ A complete volumetric toolset built for high-performance open worlds. Place and fine-tune volumetric effects such as rolling fog, waterfall mist, campfire smoke, smoke grenades, etc, with ultra-low performance impact. 🗓️ Launches Tuesday, Sept 1 on Fab!