u/poeyoh12

This allows me to draw impostor like the red circle purely with compositor effect (no mesh instance involved) in the video. The red circle is not just a post processing pass, but can also write to the depth BEFORE the Transparent pass. In the video, I make the 2D circle has a 3D impostor custom depth written in the fragment pass glsl. Check out this article for more detail: https://paroj.github.io/gltut/Illumination/Tutorial%2013.html

This opens up a lot of potential in my game, especially volumetric clouds that actually exists in the DEPTH buffer. Because it is written in compositor effect, this also allows for rendering the clouds in half resolution. And since I can write to depth, the clouds now can also occlude alpha materials.

Compositor Effect and Rendering Device has tons of potential that I find not many people are utilizing, leading to very little documentation and tutorial. I truly hope more people use it, because it is partially very close to the custom render pipeline in Unity, and they are very useful in rendering anything you want that was limited by the default rendering pipeline.

You can checkout the example demo in this repo: https://github.com/FuWan722/godot_compositor_write_depth/tree/main

In the video, the shader is attached to a quad mesh in 3D in front of the camera. The shader allow to change the depth of each pixel on the quad.

Essentially I want to write a volumetric cloud compositor effect. However it sucks because it is a screen screen effect, which has no control over the transparency sorting. I can read and check the depth of opaque objects, but transparent objects in the engine use the painter algorithm so my screen-space clouds effect has no control what transparent is culled or not.

The ability to directly write to the depth buffer like in this video would completely fix my issue. I already know the depth of my clouds at each pixel, so it would be great to write these to the depth buffer. The reason I have to use compositor effect instead of spatial shader is because I need to process the effect in half resolution to gain performance, which is not achievable in spatial shader.

I want to make an inventory slot interface similar to Resident Evil 4, but I need to it to be skewed a certain amount on the x axis to give it a 3d look. I know Node2D has a skew property, but not Control nodes. Or maybe I am looking it the wrong way, and there is a better method with out skewing?

First 2 images are from game Genshin Impact. I believe a seperate shadow layer like caster receiver or something similar like collision mask/layer would be required for this, but I have not figured it out how.