Merry Christmas, guys! It’s been 2 years since my last update to this system. Wow! Overall not much has changed, but a few interesting things did happen:
- Support for 4.21 - A new update actually comes with the version supported for 4.21.
- New Biasing Feature and Function - Previously, your options for seed distribution were limited to linear or inverse sine. But now, you can use the new biasing feature to select any value from 0 to 1 and control exactly how strong to bias towards those values without losing the full range. This feature costs 11 extra pixel shader instructions (20 to bias tile-tilting) and completely supplanted asine distribution in both control and effectiveness.
- Texture Seeding Deprecated - Even though textures were cheaper on pixel shaders, it required extra texture lookups (which balloon depending on the options selected), and this was not as accurate as the procedural methods.
- Asset Cleanup - Normal maps and textures have been cleaned up for the Stone assets. They are 2K, now they look the part!
- Preset Improvements - I’m always making minor adjustments to presets. Some presets like Mahogany and Wood now have better coloring and parallax on by default. Some of the high-end presets now take advantage of pixel depth offset.
And there is more to come in the future:
- Seamless Patch for Tile Randomizer - Right now the randomizer has a seam because the mask has to be included. I hope to integrate with parallax seamlessly, too, and the fix can be applied after I figure out the integration.
- **Iridescence - **A cool multicolored shader effect for metals and metallic coats.
- Oren-Nayar-like Diffuse - For rougher surfaces (bricks, stone, wood, etc.). This may be implemented as a roughness-based fresnel effect.
- Alternate Blend Modes - Hard Light, Soft Light, and Overlay. Currently TMs only blend as Multiply. I’m trying to trim, not explode the shader options, but it would be nice to get better blending.