Snow Shader

Shader in Unreal Engine 5 which simulates snow growth on objects. Runtime Virtual Texture that applies footsteps to objects when walked upon.

Snow - Material that contains variables for growth, strength, and falloff. Uses world position offset to make it look like snow grows on the mesh. Falloff determines how large an area the snow should cover. Growth determines how high the snow should grow. Strength determines how white the snow should be.

Footprints - When the character moves, invisible planes with a footprint texture are placed in the world. The planes then print their textures on the mesh underneath using a runtime virtual texture. The runtime virtual texture is later used in the material of the mesh and is used as a normal map to create an illusion of a three-dimensional footprint. The possibility to create an actual footprint in Unreal Engine 5 compared to Unreal Engine 4 has been made more difficult. If this project was made in Unreal Engine 4 it would have been possible to use world displacement and tesselation to make actually displace the mesh, but in this case, the use of normal maps was necessary to achieve a good result in a cheap and effective way.