Raymarched Dissolving Material

[merry lava]

https://x.com/dgant/status/1912161806069493991

Dan Gant ⚡ Games & Unreal VFX (@dgant) on X

Raymarching improvements:

- Take big steps until we cross the noise threshold
- Binary search smaller steps to approach the exact threshold
- Estimate normal via finite difference

X · Apr 15, 2025, 3:11 PM

Zoom in on the material & raymarching

[merry lava]

Freeze frame

[quiet plaza]

holy shit

that's awesome man!

[lusty gorge]

could you share the nodes on blueprint website and the hlsl here

[merry lava]

I no longer have this in its original form.

Everything should be in the screenshot. Feel free to post them if you assemble them on your end

[wintry wing]

Wow, this is EXCELLENT stuff

It always bothered me how de/materialization effects were limited to just the shell of a mesh rather than what's inside it

I was looking at the custom code and couldn't tell just by reading it - is this code limited to a sphere? My intuition says 'probably', since I'm not immediately noticing an alternative

Either way the implementation is excellent - the code looks elegant, concise, and the results speak for themselves

[merry lava]

The ray marching needs to know when the ray has exited the geometry, which requires implementing a distance field for your shape. So in this case, the assumption that it's a sphere is baked into the HLSLraymarching loop
It still works, if less convincingly, for different shapes. Or you could replace the distance field as needed

Thanks!