Fake Shadow Ideas: Using Particles as Light Photons?

An article by mgear    No Comments

This is quite an early test.. what if you use particles as “light photons” ? Then no need to do raycasting?

Current features: (main screenshot)
– Shuriken particle system, Shape: Cone, angle:90
– Collision planes on those white boxes (uh..shuriken doesnt support “world collisions”, only infinity planes that you need to manually pick/add..Oo?)
– Take each particle position, draw a light mesh there, currently shown as boxes..code taken from ChunkRenderer

Ideas:
– optimize: only draw outer edges of the light mesh? how to build closed hull from random points in unity?
– particles can bounce, lose strengh = less light? if 1 area has many particles = brighter?
– draw particle location on lowres texture with setpixel instead? and use that as a light or projector mask?
– particles could stop moving after they hit the wall? (then you have outer edges of the light? triangulate that and draw mesh?)

Webplayer:
coming later..

Download source:
coming later..