Tessellated Snow Shader

The first time around when I begun to delve into shaders it was more about learning the basics and getting comfortable working with HLSL. But the course it was made for also had optimization aspects to it so I desided to learn a bit about that aswell with how tesselation could help to keep the visuals the same or better and also improve performace. This lead me to create a interactive snow shader with tesselation using ShaderLab and HLSL. 

Something I did get out of this project was knowlege, both about shaders and HLSL, but also about the performace aspect of tesselation and that it accually had a pretty big impact

This time around I already knew the basics and had a start to begin form so I had a lot more going for me this time around. One of the first changes made to this project was how interaction was captured. 

The first version used a combination of two cameras and rendertextures. The first camera looking down on the plane with the shader only regestering things with a certain layer and drawing that to a rendertexture. The second camera looked at a plane projecting the rendertexture the first camera drew to and in turn drew what it saw to a different rendertexture. That rendertexture inturn saved what was drawn on it and removed it over time, giving it a fade away look. 

The second version of this project used Unitys particle system istead and spawned particle of a certain color and layer which a ortographic camera the looked at. The fact that I used the particle system meant that I only needed one camera instead of two because the particles themselfs took care of the fade out effect through despawning settings. 

The second version of this project used Unitys particle system istead and spawned particle of a certain color and layer which a ortographic camera the looked at. The fact that I used the particle system meant that I only needed one camera instead of two because the particles themselfs took care of the fade out effect through despawning settings. 

Somethingells I also added to this version was deformation though a noice texture which can modify the aplitude and sampling from the texture. I also added different types of deformations though different colors on particles, this version has two different types of deformation: green and red. Green is the basic one, deformes a beneth the player to a changeable depth. Red deformes upwards instead and can be comined with the green in order create a kind of mound around the player to make it seem like snow is being pushed aside.

Lasty we have shadows which I had the same problems with as in version 1, I could not get the shadowpass to aggnolage the deformation of the plane which led to shadow that still don't look great around deformations. But I did some tweeking to the height of the pass which made it a bit better but the camera still need to locked so that it can't go below the height of the pass for it to look okey. Outside of shadow casted onto the plane I also had some internal shadow this time because of the deformations, there are some customizeable setting for these aswell in the shader.