Thermal Vision

Hi all,

I know this has been discussed before but I wanted to get a few thoughts on the subject of a thermal vision shader. I've been playing Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead a lot recently and love their implementation of thermal vision (I like the idea of laying down a lot of smoke and then using thermal vision to pick off the enemy).

I gave it a little bit of thought over the weekend and so far I think the best way to implement it would be using the material system combined with a shader (having a 'heat' value assigned per-material - it's not a true reflection but it might just work!)

For materials, I thought about adding a global 'heat' value (0 - 1) per material. This would work for 'static' materials such as a wall or a tree. For more complex materials I think it would be an idea to add a new 'heat map' which takes a greyscale texture map to represent heat values.

The whole thing would have to be tied together somehow with a shader (which is where I would get stuck).

Any thoughts on that? I've only given it a quick thought so any opinions / ideas would be most welcome!

Andy