Sunshaft Effects

In my scene, I wanted to have visible sun shafts. There is a setting for sun shafts built in to the unreal lights, but these come with several drawbacks:

The effect only works best when Atmospheric Fog is added to the scene, this is a disadvantage if you do not want a fog layer at all.

Additionally, the effect only works when the light source itself is inside the viewable area of the camera, and even then the effect is only visible when the camera angle is within 90 degrees of the light source direction.



These are all huge drawbacks if you want the sunshaft effect to be visible from anywhere in  your scene or level.

I had to get creative.

I used a streaked texture on a semi-transparent material, applied to a mesh which was some flat planes in a crossed configuration.

I placed them over the light source, and incremented the design to get a good effect as I went along.

The progress is shown below, and you will see the final effect in the end of project renders.