Shader for uneven terrain or not?

Kequc

Hello!

I'm building a game that involves an island that has several layers, think of Dungeon Keeper, where everything is a big voxel you can dig into. For style only I'm offsetting the vertices by +/- 5% in any direction.

My question is since I don't plan to have the collider mesh be quite that precise, is it possible to achieve the offset vertex effect using shaders instead of building the mesh with vertices in offset locations?

I am not well versed in shaders as of yet and especially not in godot. So I want to know if this is a poor direction to go in, before I invest too much time into figuring it out. I'm worried about the way light reflects, and whether I could make it look relatively the same.

I'd probably use simplex noise to calculate the offsets, rather than random numbers if I used a shader but I don't know very much else. Do you have any guidance or suggestions for me?

Megalomaniak

Could try using a vertex shader, yes.

For starters you can create a SpatialMaterial and then from the inspector convert it to a ShaderMaterial so you would have a template to start tweaking.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/tutorials/shading/shader_materials.html#converting-to-shadermaterial

TwistedTwigleg

Another potentially helpful reference could be the vertex displacement with shaders page from the documentation. It goes over how move the vertices using noise, and how to correct the normals.