ABSTRACT
Procedural snow deformation is one of the defining graphical features in the Rise of the Tomb Raider. (See Figure 1.1.) It creates a discernable connection between Lara and her environment while serving as a key gameplay element, allowing the titular Tomb Raider to track her targets while remaining hidden from sight. At
the core of this technology is a novel technique called deferred deformation, which decouples the deformation logic from the geometry it affects. This approach can scale with dozens of NPCs, has a low memory footprint of 4 MB, and can be easily altered to handle a vast variety of procedural interactions with the environment. This chapter aims to provide the reader with sufficient theoretical and practical knowledge to implement deferred deformation in a real-time 3D application.
