ABSTRACT
Scene environments in modern games include a wealth of moving and animated objects, which are key to creating vivid virtual worlds. An essential aspect in dynamic scenes is the interaction between scene objects. Unfortunately, many real-time applications only support rigid body collisions due to tight time budgets. In order to facilitate visual feedback of collisions, residuals such as scratches or impacts with soft materials like snow or sand are realized by dynamic decal texture placements. However, decals are not able to modify the underlying surface geometry, which would be highly desirable to improve upon realism. In this chapter, we present a novel real-time technique to overcome this limitation by enabling fully automated fine-scale surface deformations resulting from object collisions. That is, we propose an efficient method to incorporate high-frequency deformations upon physical contact into dynamic displacement maps directly on the GPU. Overall, we can handle large dynamic scene environments with many objects (see Figure 3.1) at minimal runtime overhead.
