asc_sand

The sand surface for ASCENSION's dune sea, its three static parallax ranges and the flat playa they stand on.

A lit PBR surface — engine sun, ambient dome, point lights and shadow cascades all arrive through zero_pbr_shade — carrying the three things the deformed mesh cannot: a wind-aligned ripple in the normal at a 1.4 unit wavelength whose phase is dragged about by noise so it does not read as a comb, a mid-band relief filling the gap between the 6.28 unit mesh cell and that ripple, and a grain glint that is faded out past 40 units because past that it is a sub-pixel feature and drawing it is aliasing rather than detail. Albedo picks between §3's lit, shadowed and crest-highlight sand off the surface's own slope and a broad noise; the long shadow slab under each crest is the sun's own cascade, not a painted term. Finally the aerial perspective the whole part shares, e-folding at the clock bus's vis_range toward the dust colour.

There is no vertex hook: asc_dune.computeShader owns this mesh's positions. silhouette flattens the shading normal toward straight up for the far parallax ranges, whose job is a shape against the sky rather than a lit surface.