Hey all, I've been working on my first foray into shaders by creating a splatting solution. If you've played Dreams on PS4, then you have an idea of what I'm going for here. Instead of using SDFs (I hope to get to that at some point), I figured it'd be more useful for me to be able to use models from my existing model collection. 🙂
#PointCloud splats
granite onyx
Initial point cloud
First pass at proper splats
Improving the FPS
Updated to use brushes (splat textures)
Added support for alpha splats
Today's task for my splatting tool was to reduce the draw calls by packing the brushes into an atlas and have the shader read from that instead. Had to fight silly little issues along the way; splats rendering artefacts due to texture compression, insufficient padding, texel sampling issues etc., but I've learned a lot too. Also have custom editor for brush selection. 🙂
grave torrent
whoaaah that looks really cool
granite onyx
Thanks. The main proof of concept works and validates my idea, which is great, but useless unless I can improve performance. So my major focus next will be on ensuring everything is being run on the GPU and then developing a LOD based solution for the point clouds.
grave torrent
First pass at proper splats
the cloud bending with the ball and the cube was that modeled or it actually connects with near by objects?
granite onyx
the cloud bending with the ball and the cube was that modeled or it actually con...
See Womp.com or SDF Modeler for such modelling solutions. Mudbun for Unity can do such modelling too (Windows only). Clayxels is unmaintained. My goal with my solution is to be able to use any standard mesh.
grave torrent
oh ok
granite onyx
I'm also thinking of trying to make a simple SDF modeling tool for Unity that'd then output meshes to use with the above splatting tool. Something simple is all, just a bit different from eg. Pro Builder so you can use it for any kind of game (and not one bound by rendering realtime SDFs). Mudbun doesn't support Mac which is my main use-case.
granite onyx
Started on this 🙂
granite onyx
Raymarching for scene preview
granite onyx
grave torrent
wery cool
granite onyx
Finally got SDF previews working (using raymarching) and a SDF->Mesh bake 🙂
granite onyx
Adding volume sampling for the mesh splat tool
grave torrent
Finally got SDF previews working (using raymarching) and a SDF->Mesh bake 🙂
very cool but i think you will need to optimize it for better fps
but really cool
does it like generate a mesh on the points?
granite onyx
There's two different tools here. The SDF Modeler is using SDF and raymarching for previewing. Mesh generation is done with marching cubes.
The other tool is the splat tool (the first one shown in this thread and the last screenshot above). This works with regular meshes by sampling them (building a point cloud) and creating textured splat at each point. The density of this point cloud can be adjusted by the user. The point cloud was initially surface sampled only, but now I'm adding volumetric sampling.
