Custom Fog Shaders💭

[cedar flame]

Radial Fog

Global Height Fog

Local Fog Volumes (not exactly volumetric tbh)

Shoutout to @floral tartan for deleting my fucking message because I dared to attach the 3 pics together to the original post

[fathom magnet]

In future just upload one/two and attach the others after in the context, these bots are repetitive which is why it's blanketed

Looks cool though

[gentle pilot]

interesting, assuming this is radial fog and depth distance attenuation?

[cedar flame]

I'm not really using the default depth buffer. The GShader library gives me an RT that packs pixel world pos into .rgb and inverted pixel depth into .a

For the radial attenuation I just get the distance of the pixel from the camera

And for the edge fade for the volume I just get the pixel's distance from the bounding box's edges, and then smoothstep depending on the provided EdgeFade value

[mortal lintel]

radial fog 🥀

[ember umbra]

wish i could have that local volumetric fog

would be amazingly useful for gulches and valleys with fog covering

[cedar flame]

Soon

[ember umbra]

https://tenor.com/view/jarvis-jarvis-meme-smirk-tony-stark-iron-man-gif-11885783305913878074

[cedar flame]

A better fog volume. This one is actually volumetric and obscures stuff behind it, also they can overlap nicely now.

Stackable Radial Fog instances

[gentle pilot]

now how do you make the volume look like some cloud

or typically like graveyard fog

[cedar flame]

the answer to both is noise textures

and yeah i am looking into that as well dw

[gentle pilot]

is this man going to relieve me of the bane of volumetric fog

(that would be nice)

[cedar flame]

as long as you don't really care about physical accuracy and light contribution to the fog, then yes i believe i shall

[gentle pilot]

physical idc much, lights would be nice but also you cant compute every light source ever its a given

ive ran into this issue myself, every other game deals with this a bit differently

but there is no miracle solution

[cedar flame]

i do want to look into light contribution

projected texture support would def be nice

[chrome harness]

oh my god i literally needed this

soo like wheres the github or smth

[cedar flame]

i'll put it up soon

[cedar flame]

i want to at least get 1 noise masked fog volume ent in

then make some icons and pics n' shit for the workshop

[minor sinew]

does it support custom shapes?

[cedar flame]

right now i've only got a box volume

its width and height are customizable

i'll probably add a sphere as well

maybe a cone if i can figure that out as well

[cedar flame]

2D Noise modulated volume

3D one is up next

@gentle pilot Graveyard fog u were interested in :]

[gentle pilot]

looks very poggers

can you manage the height as well?

is it 3d noise?

[cedar flame]

this one is a 2D noise one, but i'm about to do 3d as well

[gentle pilot]

😍

how is performance btw

[cedar flame]

i want both as 3D noise textures are harder to get a hold of, and afaik vtfedit can't really handle big ones too well?

[cedar flame]

sec lemme stress test

367 fog volumes

about 850fps on empty flatgrass

[gentle pilot]

erm

850fps sounds wrong, even with a beefy setup ive never went above 300 fps with nothing on

[cedar flame]

default cap is 300fps

[gentle pilot]

you can uncap it?

damn ok

[cedar flame]

yeah

fps_max in console

[gentle pilot]

but anyway seems good, obviously cant judge on just one layer because 3d is going to be a lot more expensive

[cedar flame]

This is with 3D noise

it could probably look better but to be quite honest i'm not fully sure what i'm doing lol

aand bitrate is ass ofc

@gentle pilot

[gentle pilot]

yeah hard to see with bitrate

but looks somewhat decent?

[gentle pilot]

very much like it

[cedar flame]

will most likely release soon

dunno if i wanna bother trying with cubemap fog now or later

[chrome harness]

JEEEEZZZ

looks so fucking fire my guy

[cedar flame]

ty ty

[storm gull]

it probably doubles as clouds then lol

[gentle pilot]

btw @cedar flame is there a repo on gh for this? How would I go about re-purposing this for very specific things

[cedar flame]

there isn't one (yet)

[gentle pilot]

working without git?

[cedar flame]

i usually do work with git, just the structure is a bit weird rn

i will put all the source code up when it's done

[gentle pilot]

alr

[cedar flame]

how u wanna repurpose it

@gentle pilot i can give u the shader sources rn if u want

just the 3d noise variant is unfinished

[gentle pilot]

oh hold on

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1404015774267605234/1431742658652536902/gmod_2025-10-25_22-32-18.mp4?ex=6916e982&is=69159802&hm=d9bad64b929107c47748cd89e9c80cb1efcc8b1329b1bf763e7e38c37bb6dc19&

for this bit

would need to smooth out the edges of the volume, make it circular and all that

[cedar flame]

i don't mind giving u the shader source

which one u want, no noise, 2d noise, or 3d noise (unfinished)?

[gentle pilot]

i mean id rather wait you be done tbh

[cedar flame]

alr

[cedar flame]

Cubemap fog

[gentle pilot]

hes done it

the fog man

[cedar flame]

https://tenor.com/view/the-fog-is-coming-brutality-gif-26972933

[cedar flame]

https://tenor.com/view/drakeandjosh-spherical-present-take-this-offer-gif-5396234

[cedar flame]

Cylinder

Can be used as cones too since both ends have customizable radius

Can be used in conjunction with lamps for some cool effects

[chrome harness]

@cedar flame have you released this yet on github?

[cedar flame]

will do at the same time as workshop release

[chrome harness]

i would LOVE to include your work in my gamemode in the future :)

(with credits given)

[gentle pilot]

btw @cedar flame are you doing subsurface scattering

[cedar flame]

nop

[mortal hare]

hell yeah

[cedar flame]

Release is imminent, working on the workshop and git pages

Can't really say exactly when, but it's today for sure.

[cedar flame]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3607972310

@chrome harness git linked in description

[chrome harness]

thank you

actually, fuck it, have a award

[cedar flame]

really no need for that but thanks

[gentle pilot]

will disect code

thank you for taking upon yourself the task of making volumetric fog

[indigo crystal]

Thats insane

Would it be possible to plug in a custom volumetric texture?

Like if you processed a cloud or smoke sim into a volumetric vtf texture

[storm gull]

would be cool if make smoke grenade out of it

[ember umbra]

you could definitely make a smoke grenade addon with it using just the given stuff it already has

[storm gull]

i think mainly just need it so the smoke doesnt go thru walls

[gentle pilot]

I don’t think that’ll work out of the box for that use case

I’m pretty sure this isn’t voxel based

Unless you’re gonna compute the volume yourself

[cedar flame]

Ya

[cedar flame]

Yeah it isn't

Perhaps one could do something with stencils and a generated mask mesh

[gentle pilot]

@cedar flame is the github repo in a functional state, because ive been messing with it for an hour and none of the entities seem to draw anything?

only radial fog seems to work

and pressing E on the cubes does nothing

[cedar flame]

It should be, I haven't changed anything

You have GShader installed and enabled?

The pressing E on cubes thing is a separate issue, one I'd like more input on

Does pressing E not do anything for ALL of them or only some?

[gentle pilot]

it doesnt do anything

and yes i have gshader

[cedar flame]

All ents?

[gentle pilot]

yes

[cedar flame]

sec, i can fix that one real quick

@gentle pilot try editing them now, i pushed a commit to revert back to right-click > edit properties behaviour

i'm gonna get in-game and see if they're drawing for me

might be a gshader change i don't know about

they all seem to work fine for me

only thing i can think of suggesting rn is to go to gshader's settings and put it on its default preset

[gentle pilot]

well i cant even access the settings

mmmh...

its not like im doing anything crazy either, i just have gshader through the workshop

same as your addon

[cedar flame]

g-shader? it's in the post-process tab

[gentle pilot]

oh that

[cedar flame]

yeah i forgot a g

[gentle pilot]

i didnt even touch it

[cedar flame]

i just pushed the update for the editing to the workshop version too, so people using that should be able to right-click edit there too

[gentle pilot]

OH WAIT

this wasnt ticked

killing myself

[cedar flame]

lol

[cedar flame]

i should probably add a warning for that when spawning the ents

[gentle pilot]

would be cool yea

if its disabled

[cedar flame]

mhm

[gentle pilot]

need to tweak shader params further but getting somewhere

@cedar flame is that supposed to happen

i feel like im doing something wrong but

as long as i dont move it looks alright

albeit a bit weird in some places but i can tweak that

[cedar flame]

Ah you see, I am well aware of this problem, and there is actually a very good explanation for it

The problem here is:

I am not a graphics programmer and I have no fucking clue what I'm doing lol

[gentle pilot]

lol

i mean thats fair

[cedar flame]

But yeah I do know about it and it bugs me too

Might have to ask a slop machine about it

[gentle pilot]

i think its just a matter of calculating velocity of player

and offsetting scroll

[cedar flame]

Honestly no clue, it should be working with world positions anyway, I don't think velocity should matter

I will def look into it though, I hate how it looks

[gentle pilot]

ill just remove noise for now

[cedar flame]

I think it also only happens when you're inside the volume, so maybe it needs some special handling for that case

[gentle pilot]

oh yeah