Holy shit my thing actually works! Didn't even need much tweaking. This is a traditional mesh (very simple one right now - a 2x2 quad), skinned with the usual 4-weighted-bones, but it has "thickness", and has a heightfield embedded in it that the pixel shader traces through.
@TomF Looks really cool.
Is it some variant of parallax mapping?
Or does it work by some other method?
From the side it has some artifacts, but nothing like PM shaders.
A tri-planer PM shader?
@coded_artist Parallax mapping is the cheesy equivalent of my raytracer stepping through the heightfield. Again - that's not really the important bit here.
@coded_artist Publish it so people can put it in their engines and pipelines.