Attention: Here be dragons

This is the latest (unstable) version of this documentation, which may document features not available in or compatible with released stable versions of Redot.

Fog shaders

Fog shaders are used to define how fog is added (or subtracted) from a scene in a given area. Fog shaders are always used together with FogVolumes and volumetric fog. Fog shaders only have one processing function, the fog() function.

The resolution of the fog shaders depends on the resolution of the volumetric fog froxel grid. Accordingly, the level of detail that a fog shader can add depends on how close the FogVolume is to the camera.

Fog shaders are a special form of compute shader that is called once for every froxel that is touched by an axis aligned bounding box of the associated FogVolume. This means that froxels that just barely touch a given FogVolume will still be used.

Built-ins

Values marked as in are read-only. Values marked as out can optionally be written to and will not necessarily contain sensible values. Samplers cannot be written to so they are not marked.

Global built-ins

Global built-ins are available everywhere, including in custom functions.

Built-in

Description

in float TIME

Global time since the engine has started, in seconds. It repeats after every 3,600 seconds (which can be changed with the rollover setting). It's not affected by time_scale or pausing. If you need a TIME variable that can be scaled or paused, add your own global shader uniform and update it each frame.

in float PI

A PI constant (3.141592). A ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter and amount of radians in half turn.

in float TAU

A TAU constant (6.283185). An equivalent of PI * 2 and amount of radians in full turn.

in float E

An E constant (2.718281). Euler's number and a base of the natural logarithm.

Fog built-ins

All of the output values of fog volumes overlap one another. This allows FogVolumes to be rendered efficiently as they can all be drawn at once.

Built-in

Description

in vec3 WORLD_POSITION

Position of current froxel cell in world space.

in vec3 OBJECT_POSITION

Position of the center of the current FogVolume in world space.

in vec3 UVW

3-dimensional UV, used to map a 3D texture to the current FogVolume.

in vec3 SIZE

Size of the current FogVolume when its shape has a size.

in vec3 SDF

Signed distance field to the surface of the FogVolume. Negative if inside volume, positive otherwise.

out vec3 ALBEDO

Output base color value, interacts with light to produce final color. Only written to fog volume if used.

out float DENSITY

Output density value. Can be negative to allow subtracting one volume from another. Density must be used for fog shader to write anything at all.

out vec3 EMISSION

Output emission color value, added to color during light pass to produce final color. Only written to fog volume if used.