Virtual Texture Dynamic Displacement and Emissive. We’re testing this technique on They Are Coming prototype. Tutorial coming soon!
interesting, do you have a tutorial for this?
I would guess that the OP is using a channel inside the VRT and then sampling that as the channel for displacement at the end of the material. EG: write depth to the BaseColor channel of the VRT and then sample same and pass ultimately to the WPO/Displacement channel. A channel is a channel, carries information, but only matters as BaseColor, Specular, etc at that final material-node.
Doing something similar with Snow and whatnot, passing utility channels to the VRT and then sampling them back out at the end of the material.
Its easy until you need that hole the beam creates to have collision… then you are just SOL and need to go to voxel or recode half the engine to pass collision back from the gfx to the cpu - if thats even possible, haven’t seen it anywhere yet.
I suppose one could try to get creative with custom depth passes to lower the character render if within the displaced area - it would probably still look wierd though…
@OP
Great work btw, seems to run fluid even with that much tessellation on screen. That’s challenging in itself…
Yes, we will prepare a tutorial for this very soon and we will show other aspects of it. The problem of collision is still there and we have to use some tricks to solve this problem.