Simulating Geometry Efficiently

As you probably know, video games, just like movies, are very much about devices and tricks to make the viewers believe what the creator wants. However, with games, because you have to actually display a completely made-up world from scratch, your illusion has to also hold up to some standards in terms of performance – otherwise, the whole thing will crumble instantly.

This issue of finding the right trade-off between visuals and efficiency appears very frequently with shader creation, obviously. A good technical artist should be able to create stunning effects with a minimal computational cost. This search for efficient visual artifice has led to the invention of many techniques, in particular to try and fake geometry. This is because, ultimately, rendering many polygons is always hard on machines.

So, in this chapter, we will discuss three common shader tricks for adding geometry, details, or transformations to our objects in an optimized...