The Rage Game Blog

I’ve been experimenting a lot with the materials without having any pleasing result. One problem is that the vertices can only be moved around their normal, which constricts the possibilities by a fair amount. We considered then the use of Material Parameter Collections but the collections are restricted to 1024 parameters which will not be enough. Due to time restrictions I decided to move on for now and start researching if there is a way to modify the mesh directly during runtime.

Edit: The displacement of the vertices aren’t restrained to their Normal. We figured out that it is possible to use the color of the vector as a direction vector. But we also noticed that the calculation and drawing of the dynamic texture creates a big performance impact. We forgot that each object would need an additional texture just for the deformation and every texture would have to be redrawn after each impact. The update of the collision body is not possible (at least as far as we know) since the material does not update the mesh information. The new positions of the vertices are not stored in the mesh. In other words: this approach is not better performance-wise than the others, maybe even worse. And these new insights confirmed our assumption that this will not be the best approach for our thesis.

Read more about the different deformation approaches here.