Shell Texturing
After reading the Ryse moss tutorial a while ago, I ended up doing some digging around the subject. After reading some papers I wondered if it could be used for other things such as grass. I managed to get a quick alright looking snow (image, image, gif) but grass proved much trickier. It seems that it might work if you render slices of high poly grass. I'm not really sure how to approach that though, my attempts thus far have been subpar. Do any games (beside ryse) actually use this technique? It seems quite powerful for making things appear fluffy. Obviously it will have it's impact performance wise, but with careful LOD usage, would it be justifiable? Any examples of this technique would be cool to see!
Replies
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=74765
We have some more links here
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/GrassTechnique
I had actually seen that thread, I got a lot of info from it. I'm unsure as to how he created his "grass blade" opacity map though.
This looks interesting, although I see no way of implementing it only as an artist. However it looks similar to Nvidia Turf Effects, which hopefully will be implemented into UE4 etc.
I played with my snow a bit, and added some footprints. That you can dynamically add footprints is so cool. Obviously that's no directly the result of the shell texturing, but it certainly adds to the effect.
You can also put a second ProBoolean mesh a certain distance below the first one, so you get a slice of a certain thickness between the two subtractions, like a couple millimeters. Which is what you want for shell textures.
I've done this before to generate volume textures, which is basically the same idea.