Vertex-Color Backed Morph-Target

This research was made  for a  game who was happening inside the human body. Veins, heart, red cells, white cells, everything is alive and needs  to have animation.

I decide to try with a morphing base animation system. It will use one morph target and bake each new vertex position in the vertex color with the help of a Max Script


This is my first result: A beveled  cube morphing to a sphere. 
I used the original cube to do the sphere. I Applied a Spherify Modifier to it.

One problem: The normal are not changing..
Which is understandable, I did not morph the Normal.

So let  pack the normals and the morph-target together in the vertex color to have a better result. The unpack will be done in the Shader. A vertex Color is 8 bit resolution, 256 values.With the packing, I will have half resolution, only 4 bit so values. It will give me less precise result but its enough for organic shapes.


This is my second test  : Packed Morph-Target and normals together











As you can see , the position is not perfect when you look at the sphere but with a normal texture, the result is acceptable as you can see in the next video:

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conclusion:
This Technic is not precise but enough for organic animation.

other example:

Real-Time, Seamless Box Projection Mapping

I sample 3 times the same texture and The UV are created with the world position.

Code sample:

.......
float2 uvX = pos.yz;
float2 uvY = pos.zx;
float2 uvZ = pos.xy;
float4 textureX = tex2D(texSampler, uvX);
float4 textureY = tex2D(texSampler, uvY);
float4 textureZ = tex2D(texSampler, uvZ);
......

The  normals are used to lerp the textures.

......
float maskY = smoothstep(0.5f, 0.8f, abs(normal.y));
float maskZ = smoothstep(0.5f, 0.8f, abs(normal.z));
float4 finalLerp = lerp(textureX, textureY, maskY);
finalLerp = lerp(final, textureZ, maskZ);
......

This technique is more suitable for organic materials.

Video of the hlsl shader in 3dsmax

Viscous Blurred Material with Parallax Offset

In this personal research, I was searching a way to make a multi layered viscous parallax effect Material.To achieve this effect I needed a way to blur a texture. If you blur by  using a filter, it could become very expensive performance wise. Finally what I found is simply offset the mimap from the texture to have a blurred result.

1 - I used the vertex color for the parallax intensity

2 - result with a parallax offset uvs



3- Adding the MipMap offset using the same Vertex Color


4 - Finally adding the lighting to it


Video of the effect running in 3DSMAX

Cheap and Convincing Subsurface Scattering

First Prototype 3DSMAX HLSL Shader 


















UDK Shader Prototype















Virtools Prototype



Based on my HLSL Shader Research, As been Integrated in Frosbite 2
By Colin Barre-Brisebois ( Battle Field 3 Dice).

FrostBite Video:



Published in GPU Pro 2, 2011. "Real-Time Approximation of Light
Transport in Translucent Homogenous Media"
As been present at the Game Developers Conference 2011 slide



I found a nice UDK demo using the tech
eat3d.com/blog/metalliandy/approximated-sub-surface-scattering-demo-udk