As the developer acknowledges, VFX Graph would have been more efficient, but it needed to work with the built-in pipeline. Designed for a mobile game that is already performance-heavy, this smoke effect is meant to be emitted from under the wheels and reportedly has minimal performance impact, even when overlapping with the rest of the game.
According to Darwin, the setup involves a simple particle system emitting sphere meshes paired with a custom shader that uses inverted Fresnel, scrolling textures, and screen depth fade to shape and soften the smoke edges. The shader relies on emission and opacity without using albedo. Lighting is calculated using the light direction and world normal, followed by a lerp to get the desired highlight and shadow colors.
This setup was tested on a Samsung Galaxy A14 alongside the main game without encountering any issues. The developer highly recommends using inverted Fresnel for opacity masks to feather out the edges of a mesh, noting that it works exceptionally well for creating cloud effects.
See the original Reddit post here for details, and check out DarwinStreams’ jittering fire shader, available for download:
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