How to achieve this soft dust look?

Hey guys,

I hope someone can point me in the right direction here.

This is what i want to recreate:



Everything looks so soft and smooth. The dust is also made of multiple colors. Theres's obviously some bloom involved, but other than that I am pretty stumped. So I'm just gonna leave it at that and am thankful for every suggestion that helps me recreate this beautiful scene.

 

Something like this?

https://community.unity.com/t5/Works-in-Progress/Volumetric-Smoke-Shader/m-p/2364059#U2364059

 

I was about to say some sort of volumetric lighting, but upon closer inspection, it more or less seems like a bloom + fog scenario. (maybe a fog like this one? https://github.com/keijiro/KinoFog )

 

I did this in a much simpler way in Star Trek Timelines; basically, I wrote a shader which turns transparent for on-edge viewing angles, placed thousands of planes in the scene using a noise function, then rendered them all at 1/4 or 1/8th screen resolution, and upsampled them back into the full res framebuffer. The main benefit being that it works on very low end devices, and you have explicit control over the effect, and can even fly though clouds, etc.

Most of the code is available in my OffScreenParticles package, on the asset store, or on my GitHub account.

 

Alright, so I probably should've mentioned, that my skybox is different from the overall color of the dust field in that picture. And since this is a space scene, it pretty much throws that fog idea out of the window.

What @jbooth wrote looks like a very interesting concept and seems to be performance friendly, so I'm going to look further into that. I am worried about artifacting though, since it's technically just a bunch of planes, that are (at one point or another) going to visibly intersect with the asteroids. (But I haven't tried it out yet, so I might be wrong)

What I am going to try though is combining keijiro's kinofog with a shader that fades between two skyboxes, throw some bloom in there and maybe just a little bit of blur and see how that goes.

 

The shader does a soft depth as well as the angle fade, so it will naturally fade out around the asteroids and not show intersections. Here's an example of flying through a field: