Need advice for creating great enviromental weather systems, snow flakes to snow, rain drops to puddles etc.

Have created parallax mixing and because of this have invented a way of achieving weather systems.

Heres a screenshot, as you can see the bricks are indented with a rectangle, this is made possible with parallax texture mapping mixing.

Now, as a texture can contain height I thought that snow flakes falling can acumalate into snow. Just have to change a pixel or 2's color and the texture height will increase, instant snow.Probably need to do this on the GPU for best results.

So, whats the lowdown on GPU particle physics? Can/should I use NVidia's PhysX or is there anything else I can use as also want other/AMD cards too.

Will need to get the world space point of collision so can change the texture pixel the particle lands on.

Any advice appreciated.

I'm quite surprised no one has thought or implimented this as it seems such a simple idea.

To be honist not sure of physX as not built for textures, so any tutorials or code for particle physics on the GPU or CPU?

Thanks.

Have created parallax mixing and because of this have invented a way of achieving weather systems.

No. Portals and "parallax mixing" already existed. When you asked if it was possible, I linked you to prior-art... Portal based rendering used to be really big in the 90's but has fallen out of favor recently.

So, whats the lowdown on GPU physics? Can/should I use NVidia's PhysX or is there anything else I can use as also want other/AMD cards too.

If you want to implement your own particle systems that interact with your own object-space parallax maps, you're probably better off writing it from scratch in your own compute shaders. PhysX just uses compute-shaders internally, but is locked to NVidia GPUs for marketing reasons...

You can just make a structured buffer to hold particle state, use a compute shader to update that buffer each frame by binding it as a RWStructuredBuffer -- e.g. add velocity to position, modify velocity, check for collisions using ray-tracing, etc... If a ray collision hits a triangle, compute the texture coordinate for the hit location, and then add some snow/water/etc to your weather map at that texture coordinate (e.g. by binding the weather map texture to the compute shader as a RWTexture2D so that you can do random-access writes to it).

Not true, portals are still used for speed to interconnect indoor to outdoor scenes, just that mine includes shadow and light which is a world first!

Check the latest games man, before you post such comments.

As for prior art their technique is heighest texture but not texture height blending so can't have sand ontop of stone, theres is stone on top as the stone is higher than the sand. Their stone looks too clean.

Give me some credit for achieving parallax blending(new) and not max height.

I linked you an example of it in your thread where you asked if it was possible already... but the first hit on google is a video of it:

The Build engine was completely based on portals, including light and shadow. It used to be the way that engines were designed...

No sand on top of stone! Too clean and unrealistic.

Are you sure about the portals mate? Whats the shadow on the ceiling? thats because of the cut from the texture applied tothe scene.

No shadows going in or out the portal, just within.

Wheres the light to? Don't look right!

Sort it out man.

Paul your tone really isn't helping this issue, you appear both condescending and arrogant whilst constantly fighting everything people tell you. Do you want our opinion or not?

Listen to Hodgman, he's a clever guy! ^_^

May be you should read my posts more carefully, the game he shown is not gpu. As such not proper lighting. It's texture baked lighting and shadow. And a texture applied to the floor for the characters shadows(if even that) CPU'S back then could not achive proper lighting.

Show me REAL PROOF of lighting and shadow going in and out of a portal and ill shut up.Heres mine:

Also notice my technique for parallax height BLENDING, different from heighest parallax texture!

Changing the height of a parallax texture is new, I'm clever too.

Check the image below, notice the heighest of the parallax texture is not parallaxed, Thats because it's at the max texture height. . thats new too.

[IMG]

Was going to give out the code, don't think ill bother!

Show me REAL PROOF of lighting and shadow going in and out of a portal and ill shut up.