This week I introduced the melting shader to the tri-planar ground shader I've been working on. Overall I'm not super happy about how it worked out. As seen in the below video clips, when the mesh translates down, it leaves a rather messy melting blend in it's wake. What's causing it is probably the melting displacement scale when the mesh touches the melt-line. The vert function in the shader doesn't have enough vertices to work with, causing the ugly deformation. I could revisit the melting part of the shader and add some tessellation to it in order to fix the sharp edges that are made. Another issue is just how the tri-planar texture reacts to the vertex displacement. There is stretching on the rock texture when the mesh is at certain heights.
One thing that I do like about the shader is that at certain heights it looks pretty good. The picture on the right has a single mesh with the material, and the picture on the right has a few meshes together. This doesn't look too bad, mostly because the tri-planar projection helps the merge look cleaner. One issue I did notice is that there is a small ring visible around the edge of the melted vertices. That may be unavoidable because they aren't completely flush and receive light differently.
