The Trax module for MicroSplat adds features that let you carve snow trails, tear up grass into mud, or other effects based on physical interactions with the surface.
Features Added:
- Snow Tracks (Requires Dynamic Snow module) allows you to have objects carve through the snow leaving trails behind.
- Trax Texture allows you to perform similar effects on regular terrain, replacing the grass with mud when a tire runs over it. You can choose a single texture or one for each surface on your terrain.
All effects combine well with the Tessellation and Parallax Mapping
module, physically pushing the tessellation around. Though this module is not required, and all effects are tuned to look good without tessellation as well.
Trax contains an extensive set of modifiable parameters, allowing you to customize textures and parameters in the effected areas. For instance, you can use a new snow texture, or modify the parameters of the snow to make it look packed down or fluffier in the compacted areas.
The Trax module is physically simulated, allowing the shape of your object to be imprinted into the terrain. Want giant modeled tires for trucks to leave an imprint? No problem. Want a animated dragon to slosh the snow around as it moves? No problem.
The effect area can be customized, and parented to a player such that the effects are always simulated around the player.
Trax supports time based effects, allowing imprints to fade over time, and even stop repairing at some threshold such that they never fully recover.
Trax can also interact with the Wetness, Puddles, Streams and Lava features, leaving puddles behind in footsteps (or lava, etc)
Like everything in the MicroSplat line, you can trust that Trax is blazingly fast, easy to use, and just works. The cost of having additional objects render into the trax buffer is extremely cheap, so you can easily use this on every object that moves across your world.
On a 980TI, with the Trax buffers set to 2048x2048, rendering took 0.56ms per frame.
Trax works in all render pipelines