Decals

A decal is a material projection on the surface. It allows you to add a lot of additional details at basically no performance cost. Besides, sometimes it is merely impossible to bake all the details into textures considering the huge amount of probabilities of the coordinates where the interaction can take place (e.g. the bullet holes, bloodstains, ashes etc.) Decals can disappear after the specified life time period.

Decal-Based Tree Remnants on Sand

Types of Decals

There are 3 types of decals that differ in the way they are projected:

Object Decal is a decal that is projected right onto the object's geometry and gets a new defined shape.
Terrain Decal is a decal projected on a terrain with the correct LOD transitions of vertices.
Deferred Decal is a decal rendered based on the image deferred buffer depth value and there is no real geometry rendered at all. Such decals are preferable from the performance cost, though they do not support instancing and each decal costs at least a DIP.

Decals

Types of Decals

See Also