Sometimes it's really obvious combinations of basic techniques.
And sometimes a graphics programmer does a handful of vector products or matrix operations and produces something that makes you go 'how the hell did you think of that?' when you look at it. Any time I see a sufficiently amazing shadertoy the odds are decent that the actual code for it is way simpler than I expect but still nothing I could've come up with.
I wonder how that compares to SDF rendering of grass. SDF has a high cost due to the raymarching part, but you essentially get free repetition with local tweaks.
This is great. I’m working on a similar grass rendering inside Godot 4.0 - currently using MultiMeshInstance but was unhappy with performance / look even with the maximum of 65335 instances. I think I will try and apply some of the compute shader stuff for culling. Thanks for posting!
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadAnd sometimes a graphics programmer does a handful of vector products or matrix operations and produces something that makes you go 'how the hell did you think of that?' when you look at it. Any time I see a sufficiently amazing shadertoy the odds are decent that the actual code for it is way simpler than I expect but still nothing I could've come up with.
I watched his entire process twice, have made sdf animations myself (nothing nearly as good) and it’s still all black magic.