Hi all, i’m sorry if the title sucked. I truely have no idea what a better title could be.
Here is my concept. You have a 3d map of say a dirt path, would it be possible to transform a 3 ft by 2 inch piece of earth up? (so, essentially given the correct imput you can alter the land so that the ground infront of you moves up in the y axis)
If you need more explanation ill do my best, ill even post sketches if you need.
Thank You
Yea more info pleasr. So far sounds like you walkin up hill
Its not just a hill, this is going to be a nightmare…
Say there is again, solid ground. Using the Leap Motion as input, would it be possible to take a cross section of ground infront of a character and translating that cross section of the ground up.
Here is a super quick sketch adding a picture wouldn’t work, otherwise i would
That could only be done with meshes that sit below the ground and are triggered to rise according to your criteria
The way that King Mango suggested will work, but it depends on how realistic it should look like -> you could also do it with materials and tessellation 
Thank you King Mango, i will try that
Just to be clear, so if my ground is created in say 3ds and i import it and then use materials & tesselation i should be able to move a certain ammount of triangles, poly whatever up or down.
One more thing, using tesselation with PN Triangles would there be easy to see streaching of materials?
Not on a landscape. Could you imagine trying to set up a mask for every little bit you wanted to add Z to???
What about the texture for the vertical polys? Would be interesting now to know if world aligned texture would work for that.
I don’t think tessellation is a practical answer for this.
Oh I see you posted while I was replying.
This would be practical if your deformations were in a fixed location but you would have to create a black/white mask to use as a tessellation multiplier for each section you wanted to raise. Though I’m not even sure you can use a texture in that channel. Then we get to the issue of connecting that to matinee or whatever it’s called in UE4 now. You would have to trigger the event and have an animated value fed into your material to smoothly animate a tessellation change.
If you’re doing the ground in it becomes much easier. If you are concerned with the silhouette of the raised bit you could duplicate the faces you wanted to raise, then extrude them forming their own separate mesh this would make the top of the raised part match the terrain it was raised from.
Ok, so if i made a mesh of my ground in unity. Would i be able to (in-game) transform them? Say i perform input and as a result, a section of polygons have their y axis position changed. The issue is that, doing so would cause stretching of the polygons and more importantly, it would be visually obvious of what happened and it would look like ****. God, i’ll try looking some more in documentation
Use a world space texture. I’ve found that the Luos cave pack has a very good demonstration on how to use it correctly. Then just use tessellation / bump offset maps to modify the terrain.
You’ll have to use one of the RGBA channels in vertex colors for that. But you still have to create a material instance and access it via matinee to get it to animate
I did some of the work for you since it’s an interesting problem.
You will likely experience cracking with the type of deformation you want.
Some important answers:
Yes, worldalignedtexture works on vertices that have been offset in the shader
Yes, worldalignedtexture works on vertices that have been DX11 tessellated
Yes, (AWESOME) textures can now be used in worldpositionoffset!
I just knocked up a quick example if you want the shader and test mesh PM me and I’ll email them to you.
[EDIT] My advice is to use meshes