this crossed my mind before, just didn’t have time to try it yet
however it will still cause wrong lighting on uneven terrain since the decal only has one up vector so it will only match the shading at one specific point but not all of the surface. as such, it’s unclear to me at this point what would be the benefit of this
that’s what I hinted at before. I’m still not convinced it will be good enough since partial derivative reconstruction of normals usually has some shimmering pixels. I’ll have to find out!
depends on the case. in my example above, on the back of that rock there was already a very vertical “wall” and it looked really bad (I just didnt show it!). in such cases a hard cut (i.e. not having the feature) would even be more natural.
but the example above was a rock on a flat slope. now imagine a rock on a steep slope, keeping in mind that the UVs are top-down. it can cause some bad stretching on a lot of cases.
I’ll show some pictures later to illustrate the issue
I also fail to understand this. if the decal is rotated towards the light (but projected on the backside of the mesh), isn’t the decal in shadows already? also don’t decals get light properly anyway? (i.e. if you put a decal on flat terrain and rotate it upwards the terrain becomes dark). I guess this means some more testing from my side to catch this possible pitfall (so far I only tested with ‘around noon time’ light setup)
alright thanks 