I know nothing about shaders, so bear with my ignorance. Is it possible to create a shader for a projector that will create a bumpmap effect on whatever it is projecting on to? If anyone reading this has read any of my recent threads about transparency and footprints, I can’t use projectors to do them because 1)I’m using a bumpmap effect for the footprints and 2)I don’t think projectors can fade in and out with transparency (if I’m wrong on either of these suppositions, PLEASE correct me ).
In actuallity, a projector would be ideal for this since I wouldn’t then have to figure out how to match the footprint tile texture to the terrain texture. It would be perfect if I could just point the projected bumpmap onto the terrain where I need it.
Is it possible?
(and, as I think about the possible applications of such a shader, craters and any other such depressions created by impacts could also be done the same way)
I think projectors for each individual footprint would kill your performance really fast. Projector works by drawing whole mesh it projects onto. Imagine having 100 footprints - your ground will be drawn 100 times.
So instead, I think manually constructing geometry for the footprints is a better approach.
That said, projectors are nothing special; they just draw the mesh with their shader. If you use bumpmaps in the projector shader, it should work (I think…).
Ouch. I wasn’t aware it drew the entire terrain. I figured geometry (even being a simple plane) would be more of a load. I already had designed in a limit to how many prints can be drawn at any given time to reduce the performance hit, but if that’s the case with projectors, I’ll stick with what I’m doing now.
I tried using a bumpmap shader on a projector and never was able to get it to work. I never really tried digging too much into it, though.
).