IIRC it was done with a vertex shader that reacts to the player's collision mesh. Similar to the InteractiveFoliageActor in Unreal: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/InteractiveFoliageActor.html
IIRC, detail maps were used in the first Unreal game, back in 1998. Some more stuff here: http://wiki.polycount.com/DetailMap The WoW billboard trick is very cool!
Unreal Tournament 3 with its animated textures and effects. When i first watched it with those giant tentacle pillars and saw how it was "flowing" was pretty cool. The way they did the legs of the machines with tentacles were badass too. and the smoke pillars. https://youtu.be/6rKiuMOIUlg Call of duty 2 explosions and…
Cool! The vertex shader is indeed an interesting thing. Similar techniques can be used to apply wind on vegetation for example. During my experimentations, I encountered a problem which i still wasn't able to solve, and it was about the calculation of the new normals. The DDX DDY method works only if you are fine with hard…
warlox Glad to hear that you like the artices :) Hopefully Eric could satisfy your question? Eric Wow, didn't know anilyzer.com! Great tool!! Joao Sapiro I'm an simple artist too which is why I'm amazed by tech which for others might be standard. Since I never worked with "real" engines like unreal/unity/cry (both…
First of all: Thank you NEOX for the solution. I added it to the article and made some additional example pictures. Zwebbie Then you should checkout Halflife2. It uses detail maps also very much. And of course Unreal Tournament 3. And to your suggestion: no, it's done like Neox said. Checkout the added explanation in my…