General Half-Life 2/Effects
description
Dense fog that looks good, but maybe expensive to the engine.
keywords
smoke, effect, effects, volume, dense, fog, func_smokevolume.
OK, so you have mastered the simple fog tutorial, now its time for the advanced fog technique, its pretty simple but getting the perfect settings is a pain in the you-know-what!
Step 1: Getting Set Up
For this you will need to make an area to play, maybe add a bit of detail to it like water or something like that, nothing major just an environment that you can move around in.
Step 2: Create your Foggy Area
Now draw a brush over the area you want the fog to be cast, and assign the NoDraw texture to it. Assign this brush to the entity func_smokevolume, this is what your fog will be.
Go into the properties and set materials to particle/particle_noisesphere, you can select other particles, for a list of particles just filter for the word particle; this is what is going to be made up in your fog zone
Now for the fun part, you have to play with two of the properties to get the kind of fog you want
-Particle Draw Width makes the sprites of each "cloud" or "dust" bigger but don’t make it to big or
your map will lag with each "cloud" being clumped together and huge.
-Particle Spacing Distance is how much spacing between each "cloud" is separated from each other. If too far apart it’ll look ugly.
Step 3: The Ambience
Now for my favourite part of the tutorial, you can easily change the fog colour by going into the properties and changing particle colour 1 and particle colour 2, but we don’t want that! One advantage of advanced fog is that basic lights look so so so much cooler in game, so stick one in your map anywhere, compile and play away. Now it may take a few tests to get the perfect Draw Width and Spacing Distance, but once you have them just right you can have a Spooky looking map!
Step 4: The Conclusion
Now that you have a decent looking fog you may want to experiment with it, like blending two different fog brushes into each other with different colours or use some advanced lighting for an even better effect. Also, as I mentioned earlier you might want to play around with the particle choice and the spacing and width, the screenshots above were taken with the settings on default (aside from the material choice) so it’s up to you to play around with it, this is a powerful skill, use it well.
Example Map
http://www.interlopers.net/downloads/maps/advfog.zip
Contributed by Wiggle987
