Can 3D reapers and similar be blocked using shaders?

Hi everybody

Recurrent topic, how to protect your assets. In my case, I need to design a 3D visualizer where I’ll have only meshes, and those meshes ARE the product, so… well.

Obfuscate the code, split and encrypt during transit and so on. My question is about protecting with shaders.

Let’s say I have a model where some polygons are placed 5 units far away from their correct position, but using a vertex shader I move them to the correct one. Also, using fragment shaders I’ll change the opacity of fake faces and so on.

This would not avoid someone to rip the meshes, but I just hope they don’t get them in a single piece, but in many unsorted ones like a puzzle.

Would this work? Any new ideas from the end of 2020?

Thanks in advance.

I think in general that anything that is on the internet can be viewed by anyone with sufficient know-how. That said, I think you could definitely use the shader to make it obscured. For instance, create a uniform value that contains a random set of numbers. Use that set of numbers to adjust those random vertices in your GLTF so that only when they are loaded via your software they are adjusted at runtime. I don’t think this is really all that secure, since people can just look at your code to figure out what you’re doing, but better than nothing.