Bike tire shader

[PGComai]

This was originally gonna be in the help section, but while I was typing out a question about calculating the normals I had an idea and it ended up working.

I have upgraded the visuals for the tires in my bike game and I wanted to share. I sample a texture for vertex displacement, use gradient descent to make the normals, and I can color the treads separately to simulate stuff like dirt or mud on the tires. I would like to add a squish effect where the tire meets the ground next.

Is it worth the extra 500k triangles? Maybe.

Update: it actually affects performance

[exodrifter]

wow, that looks pretty nice! it’s too bad about the performance though. maybe you could still get a good effect with just a normal map, since the player probably won’t be looking that closely at it?

[isomorphism]

oooooooooooooo pretty

[PGComai]

Yeah that seems like a good idea. Vertex displacement has come skidding to a halt.