Melting Snow Shader approach

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.nl/2012/12/dynamically-melting-snow.html

This article describes how to create a melting snow effect in shader model 2.0. Perhaps you can go creative with it .
For the record: I did not write this article, credits go to Joost, developer at Ronimo Games.

Cool! Did you do this for a sepcific game?

nice idea

I haven't tried it myself, but it was a good read. Something worthy to put in the bookmarks .

Here is a better utilisation of that sort of shader :
Some sort of multitexture painting in the 3D models directly, so you can have lot of variety and non repetition on textures.

Transisiton shader

A little explanation. This is pretty easy to do.

This may be a stupid question but I don't understand the concept behind vertex colors:


I know that if I have a color vector in the vertex shader and push it to the pixel shader the values get interpolated, but where does the vertex color come from? Is it a regular tex2D operation in the vertex shader? If yes/ no, is it possible in acknex?

Vertex colors are part of the mesh. You create them with a modelling tool. I'm not sure if MED can do this, but I expect that mdl supports vertex colors. An example of how to use a vertex color:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11856547/getting-the-color-of-a-vertex-in-hlsl

This should get you started. I haven't done anything in hlsl since I departed from 3dgs, but it should be fairly simple.

the vertex color is just a value stored in a vertex declaration (just like POSITION, TEXCOORD0, NORMAL, ...)
But afaik gamestudio doesn't support vertex colors natively but you could use other vertex data for this (like second UV set or the first one and use triplanar texture mapping or similars)

Gamestudio does not support vertex colors but 3 texture coords

I don't know how to use 2nd and 3rd texture set... but if I guess well it could be used for storing a lighmap?

Thank you both for the explanation and idea!
Using the 3rd coordinate set (a float4 vector) works fine!