For those interested, here's a breakdown of my little Three.js Halloween scene. This was a little fun project I had family members involved, getting feedback on how it should look, etc...
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Let's start with the lighting. One strong directional (moonlight) + an HDRI from polyhaven.com.
The moonlight strength has a soft exponential falloff from full strength (on the ghost) to about 20%, over roughly radius 6. There's a light "cloud map" modulation on the Worley noise.
The moonlight strength has a soft exponential falloff from full strength (on the ghost) to about 20%, over roughly radius 6. There's a light "cloud map" modulation on the Worley noise.
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The trees are from @quaternius, with a small modification to round out the normals so that the lighting appears softer.
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Particles are a custom-built system (have posted about it before). Lighting on the smoke particles is simulated with sphere-derived normals.
Flames and smoke are combined into a single "add/alpha" blend state, which allows you to have partices that are partially additive or partially alpha.
Flames and smoke are combined into a single "add/alpha" blend state, which allows you to have partices that are partially additive or partially alpha.
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The ground is a single plane, detail is driven by texture splats, texture contribution controlled via an RGBA map, with the material textures stored in a texture array. The illusion of depth is via POM.
I made a video about it on my YT channel ages ago, you can look it up.
I made a video about it on my YT channel ages ago, you can look it up.
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Grass is inspired by Ghost of Tsushima grass. Blade vertices are generated in the vertex shader from indices. The wind is just sampled noise, the only trick here is the noise implementation is the same on the CPU side, allowing us to do things like sample it for moving particles.
mplemented the particles on the GPU, maybe a job for Codex.
mplemented the particles on the GPU, maybe a job for Codex.
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The ghost is inspired by @Aaddrriieenn, no idea how he made his, but mine is a ball with a cloth sim draped over it. Super simple setup.
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The dog is inspired by Horizon: Forbidden West's cloud rendering tech. It's an vaguely dog shaped SDF volume, raymarched using cloud-rendering techniques, and the shadow is composited onto the scene.
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The highlight here is a little outline shader, blurred, and uses depth to keep the glow from bleeding through objects in front. This is composited into the scene with bloom.
Sep 28, 2026 · 3:37 PM UTC
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I think in the near future, AI will handle much of the implementation. But if you lack the "vocabulary" to adequately express what you want, you're stuck with copying or random iteration.
Making something "cool" is different from making what you envisioned.
You need to have the language to describe the thing you want, and that language right now is gamedev.
Making something "cool" is different from making what you envisioned.
You need to have the language to describe the thing you want, and that language right now is gamedev.
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