thanks, the maths is really "weird" especially getting the light and view directions for the pixel shader (screen space) and a different light direction for the vertex shader (view space) as the lighting and normals come in two parts.... one for the overall clump of points handled in vertex shader and then each billboard…
on a side note this is quite weird, I'm not sure whats causing it but when adding the gradient with noise as a vertex color angled across a 100 by 100 segment plane you get an odd interference pattern when the octives are 8 or higher. And It only happens when angled.
You can do this in Max already. A few hoops, but probably scriptable. Vertex Paint modifier has a soft selection button. Use that with vertex sub-object selection to flood-fill the gradients on your model. To bake it, put a material on your model with a Vertex Color map in the diffuse, then use Render To Texture. Viola!
Are you sure? I haven't really looked into it. But if those nifty vertex animated flags in Epic Citadel work I don't see why the vertex deformation shown in my video shouldn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dqsPbiqpP4 Vertex Group Selection tool - with no selection, it cycles through all groups of the object - with a selection, that shares one common vertex group, that group is selected imedeately - with a selection, that shares multiple vgroups, those groups will be cycled through
finally got round to making a very short demo vid of my improved conform wsm modifer for max [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTRDSQMShFU"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTRDSQMShFU[/ame] uses a kdtree to speed up the ray tracing on larger meshes, it will "conform", the verts, normals, vertex colours and mapping. Has…