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Shell texturing vs raymarching

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Jan Mróz

Proposed by Jan Mróz

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Description

Jan Mróz's September 2025 Procedural Pixels article compares shell texturing, which draws many normal-offset passes of the same surface, with fragment-shader raymarching that folds those layers into one pass.

The post walks through volumetric fog examples, Nsight GPU Trace profiling on an RTX 3060, and cases from fur and reentry heat to energy shields. It covers mesh duplication, instancing with SV_InstanceID, geometry-shader shells, in-shader layer loops for stacked transparent effects, and plane raycasting with scene depth tests when geometry is simple.

It targets advanced Unity graphics programmers and tech artists who already understand overdraw, blending, and HLSL and want quantitative trade-offs rather than a tutorial introduction.

The piece is a standalone deep-dive blog entry with pseudo-code, before-and-after timings, and links to a related VRAM bandwidth article and Shadertoy demos.

It helps teams decide when discrete shell layers are worth the fill-rate cost versus when consolidating layers in the fragment shader is faster on bandwidth-limited hardware.