Fur in T3D
by RoundedIcon · in Torque 3D Beginner · 04/29/2014 (6:04 pm) · 3 replies
I have been interested in fur shaders for a while, but there are a few questions I am hoping I can get answers to before I try to make one or commission someone else to.
1 - How difficult would it be to implement a shader like this or this, or to update the old TGE shader found here?
2 - What kind of performance impact would the shaders have at their simplest/most complex?
3 - If none of the methods or shaders above are viable options, are there any that are?
Thanks in advance to anyone that helps me out with this.
1 - How difficult would it be to implement a shader like this or this, or to update the old TGE shader found here?
2 - What kind of performance impact would the shaders have at their simplest/most complex?
3 - If none of the methods or shaders above are viable options, are there any that are?
Thanks in advance to anyone that helps me out with this.
About the author
#2
05/01/2014 (10:36 am)
Thanks for responding James. Looks like I might have to put fur shaders on the backburner for a while, as I really have no idea how to do the things needed to implement it. 
#3
05/01/2014 (8:13 pm)
I was curious about this myself because I know I will need this down the road. I was thinking of using cloth physics at first and mount it to the object, but I am not sure if it is currently possible to mount physX objects, probably not. The newest thing that came to my mind is using a high level parallax texture with animation. Unfortunately, I can only speculate what this would look like because it is next to impossible to create them, maybe you have a better knowledge of this. 
Associate James Urquhart
Most likely you would need to create a custom RenderBinManager to render the fur shells, as well as add a new ShaderFeature to ShaderGen to handle animating any movement.
Performance impact is an open question because it really depends what you are rendering. On a conceptual level though, you're going to end up rendering your geometry X more times than usual, where X is the number of fur shells you are using.
In terms of difficulty, I'd probably say it's moderate.