Falling Snow and Intersection of Terrain Texture

Started by WAS, June 10, 2021, 04:26:14 PM

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WAS

Curious. I know TG isn't really ready to be rendering small particles of snow currently, but I am still interested in setting up a sim to render small or later. But my idea was, is there a way to tell when a particle of snow passes the texture space of the terrain, and "capture" it and basically apply it to  surface layer mask, ans as snow passes that intersection zone gets "stuck to the ground" as if the snow is actually covering the surface. With the driver noise moving, I'm unsure how you would capture "states" of the noise as a scalar to add to another... not sure if it's even possible, but that sort of functionality could be powerful.

Dune

That would be cool indeed, but I doubt if there's anybody out here able to answer that  :P
I can imagine there is a way to tell the surface (use displacement to scalar and a certain range to catch altitude of terrain) if a certain moving down noise white 'particle' passes that altitude and then colors the surface white (if, so and so, if not, so and so). But the problem is that that 'particle' of noise will move on down and get out of that zone, and snow disappears again. It should be cumulative, and I wouldn't know how to accomplish that.
It can be done to color a surface white and smooth it over time, I'm sure, but not by actual noise 'reading'.

WAS

Thinking about it, I think it could be done with some sort of buffer (not sure that's the word I want; Accumulation/Cache shader maybe) shader, which takes a input, captures it, and applies some sort of effect like merge shaders. We'd obviously want an "Add" feature. Then whatever is passed to it that frame, is saved, and always there, and anything else any other frame "Added" to what was before it. That way you could feed a particle to it via a conditional scalar where that condition is if it's intersecting the terrain.

Dune

Yes, that's the acumulation idea I was talking about, but it needs a math wizard 8)