A phenomenon that is becoming increasingly more rare as our planet grows warmer by the year; snow! You may remember the powdery stuff from your childhood, and yes, it still exists at the highest of mountain peaks. To pay hommage to these frozen flakes of water, I’ve decided to research modern technologies that allow us to simulate life-like wintry weather using Unity. To be more precise, I will be looking into ways to make snow move around a player’s feet when walked through, as well as adding manipulable snowfall.
Leaving behind footprints in the snow in video games isn’t exactly a new concept; look at 1998’s Metal Gear Solid for example. Figure 1 show how Snake would leave behind footprints when walking on snowy ground (and AI enemies would even recognize them!), most likely done by temporarily adding a textured plane on top of the snow, taking Snake’s velocity and rotation into account to determine how to place it.
A more advanced way of simulating snow, using a mesh for snow and deforming it, is a more recently developed technology. About a decade ago Ubisoft published Assassin’s Creed III … Continue with ACIII GDC talk and mention Horizon and GoW
Tesselation
Tesselation is cool
Raycast method
Fast and simple
Depth camera
More complex but much better
Sources
Fig 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjPpX1g1juo
