If you use Unreal Engine 4 you might have heard of a method called Depth Based Blending of Objects with the ground. This is a very cool technique where an Alpha Buffer is created within the Shader. This gives a smooth blending of an object with the ground.
Here is a similar approach in Houdini which can work in Mantra or Karma. All you get back will be a distance per pixel to any other geometry in the scene or specific objects (scope parm in rayhit operator). The fit operator can be used to control the fading.
When we apply this to a an Object we get following results:
Comparison with Megascan Assets:
Without Alpha Blending:
With Alpha Blending: (maybe is bit too much here but you can see hard edges are gone)
