Hello,
I’m wondering if anyone has some good resources on how to cheaply soften the edges of a mesh that uses a cylinder geometry and MeshBasicMaterial, to give context to what i mean I’ve found some resources on how this would be done in other rendering pipelines such as unity, blender, houdini, for more context, here is the result i currently have…
and here’s more the effect i’d like to achieve…
one option would be to go the extreme of using some volumetrics like in this three example but maybe there’s some ideas that would simply use a ShaderMaterial or modified MeshBasicMaterial to almost “blur” near the edges of a mesh?
thanks 
If it’d be unlit like on the images - rendering it as a volumetric would be actually quite cheap, you’d need at most 2-3 steps through the volume to get the nice foggy effect on the edges (and the shader code would be waaaaaay shorter than MeshStandardMaterial / MeshPhongMaterial 
)
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Thanks for the fast response @mjurczyk
yes it would and can be unlit essentially, however I’d like to use the result on instances of InstanceMesh but yes what you’ve suggested makes sense and is a good port of call to see what possibilities there are in terms of volumetrically producing the effect…
I’ve put together a small boilerplate of the example but having a bit of difficulty getting the shader to meet the edges of the cylinder volume in a way that’d closely resemble the image above
I’ve also found and modified this absorbance shader on shadertoy…
i’m wondering how this could be applied to an actual cylindrical Mesh and if this would be cheaper than using the volumetric approach?