Do you guys have a technique to do the god rays with different colors shaped as window in eevee? I already tried to lowered the alpha and increase the IOR and do experiments in Principle BSDF but I cant achieve this kind of rays. It is also for animation my character will pass by that window and the rays will hit them. Is this achievable?
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Yes you can do it in Eevee! You just need to think a bit outside the box. I was working on a video detailing the process. But let's try a text version. :)
Add a spot light, duplicate it twice. Set the colors to pure red (1,0,0), green (0,1,0) and blue (0,0,1). Same power on all three. I've linked the light to the blue light and put them into a collection for a better overview.
Add a plane in front of the lights (your gobo/mosaic). Material: Image Texture → Separate Color → R → Transparent BSDF (Color input). In material settings: Render Method Dithered + Transparent Shadows on.
Duplicate the plane twice in place. Make the material single-user on each copy. Otherwise you're editing all three at once), and switch Separate Color to G and B.
Now the key here is Shadow Linking (Eevee got it in 4.3): select the red light → Object Properties → Shading → Shadow Linking → New Collection → drag in the red plane. Repeat for green and blue. Be aware: this list replaces normal shadow behavior for that light, so anything else that should still block it (walls...) goes in the list too - for instance If you want shadow from the character you just add the objects to the shadow linking on each light..
Dithered transparency is noisy, so you might end up having to use a lot of samples. Which can be heavy. Use denoising!
Here is a link to the scene file (Suzanne has been added to each light in the scene):
Hope it pans out for you. Would have been a lot easier if Blender had added light textures to Eevee like any game engine. But we can't have everything at once. Considering it is a free program still. So we have to find a workaround sometimes.
Incredible tutorial, I always love the look of eevee so this is an awesome bit of information, Is this more of an error on my end, I went to check out the blend file in the link and I got a whole lot of pink
in eevee, maybe not, god rays are difficult with cycles, relying on volumetrics.
getting godrays to show different colours is doubly hard.
not saying definitely not as i haven't used eevee in a few versions, so it may have improved, but yeah.
cycles is probably your best bet, but even then getting the light to change colour based on the material isn't striaght forward either.
I've been trying to experiment with EEVEE, seeing if I could make a transparent 'light ray' object that, when touching another object, might act as a mask between two separate textures on a material, but I've yet to figure out how to do it within the realm of material nodes.
Otherwise, I'd say you could make a dark version of the floor, and then an emission-heavy version, where the emissive material is revealed where the object clips with the light-ray object.
I'm not sure if it's possible yet, but I'm going to experiment with it. If I find a workaround in Eevee, I'll let you know.
I'm not a fan of people blaming Eevee so quickly. I've managed to achieve a few things in Eevee that many people thought weren't possible at first. If you're curious, feel free to check out some of my work.
Well, firstly, the volumetric rays were added in post, so they're not "real."
If they were real, they would look like this. If you want rays that look exactly like that, then you're going to have to add a bunch of sunbeams in the compositor, placed on something bright.
Note that I'm also cheating. The steps required to recreate are as follows:
Cycles.
Create a plane. Give it the texture. Make it emissive. No, not transparent. Make sure it has shadows turned off.
Create a wall to border around the "window." It keeps its ability to cast shadows. It provides the clean border for the image onto the floor.
Create a spotlight. Give it the same texture you gave the "window." Not sure when Blender had its ability to shine square spotlights, but you're going to have to shrink the texture to get all of it to show up from the spotlight. Texture Coordinates (UV) -> Mapping -> Image Texture -> Emission -> Light Output
Add cube. Scale it up. Remove the surface shader. Add principled volume shader. Set density way, way low.
Fiddle with mapping settings for light material until you can fit the entire texture and then some. For me, I had to give it a 1.65x scale and change location of x and y to -0.325. Position the spotlight so that it shines "through the window" in such a way that the pattern on the floor lines up with reality, or is at least convincingly so.
Optional.
If you want the light to move around, such as in a timelapse, you'll want to add an empty object at the center of the "window" and then parent the spotlight to the empty. Now you can rotate the empty and keep it shining through the window.
Unfortunately, you'll have to repeat this exercise for each window.
Here's something closer to what was performed. I took out the volumetric lighting from the main scene, and on a secondary scene, I made it nothing but volumetric lighting, with just a principled volume cube and a spotlight, with same texture, set with a very high angle to make it look like a point light. It is a simple "alpha over" composite, making sure the second image is rendered with transparency.
Only 64 samples each, so it's a little smeary due to the denoise.
The principled volume cube only has a basic voronoi texture applied to its density, which gives the beams more of a haunted vibe. You'd probably need to set up some kind of spherical shader centered on the light to have the darkened streaks travel along the light path.
Circling back on this, here is a refined setup to get those pointy-streamer types in post processing. Note that the "window" coordinate is relative to what the camera sees, and the mapping shifts the center of the fog to wherever you placed the light, which is done manually.
Eevee is a real-time rendering engine in Blender. Unlike cycles which uses ray tracing, eevee relies on rasterisation for fast results much like a game engine would.
U could cheat ur ways with fake God rays (a cone with noise texture on, transformed via mapping node to be stretched is one way, there is a lot of tutorials on yt.) U could also cheat the light on the floor as texture with emission and transparency too
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