Deformable Snow for Unity -- PIGSquad Stream Repo

Workshop streamed on: https://www.twitch.tv/pigsquad!

A straightforward technique for rendering deformable snow in limited areas based off of http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020177/Deformable-Snow-Rendering-in-Batman

Summary:

• An orthographic camera with a short clipping plane captures depth without clearing its buffer.

• A shader for snow reads the depth texture and creates imprints in its tessellated surface.

• Snow is refreshed by using a screen effect which constantly darkens the imprint buffer.

Notes:

This specific implimentation is for flat fixed areas! It can be reconfigured to different aspect ratios but doesn't work outside its volume. It's possible to extend though!

In That Blooming Feeling I used a similar technique in world space that follows the camera and has the environment responding to the buffer (animating / recoiling / +). It's based off of Naughty Dog's method they use for vehicle damage, foliage interaction, +. They have some good notes on this lower down in this talk! http://advances.realtimerendering.com/other/2016/naughty_dog/index.html

If this doesn't work on your machine out of the box double check you're using OpenGLCore or DX11+ in your Unity project. Tessellation is only supported on more recent graphics APIs.

Cheers,

Holly Newlands

@thnewlands