Volumetric Painting Mode Hid in UE5's Valley of the Ancient Revisited

Playing the game using this game mode enables you to paint realistic fog and mist.

In case you missed it, last year, Senior Tech Artist at Epic Games Asher Zhu revealed that he hid a neat Volumetric Painting mode in Unreal Engine 5's Valley of the Ancient demo. Playing the demo using this game mode allowed the artist to paint realistic wind and fog density with all the ground effects following a wind map.

Recently, the artist revisited this secret game mode once again and showed all of us the amazing fog-making capabilities of Unreal Engine 5. The new demo shared by the author showcases some game-ready mist created using a combination of Volumetric Fog and flipbook particles for details. 

"Both Volumetric Fog and flipbook particles are spawned with the same density logic, defined by paintable 2D masks, terrain Height Map, and stacked 3D noises. This exact same logic for density is written in Material and Niagara using the same paintable 2D masks," commented the artist last year on the inner workings of the system. "Because everything is deterministic, Volumetric Fog and Niagara particles appear in the same position, forming the same shapes. Niagara particles can even predict where they are going to be, in order to spawn ahead of time to fade at the start of the flipbook."

And here's how you can try out this hidden system:

You can learn more about the hidden Volumetric Painting mode here and check out the artist's other projects over here. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more. 

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