So, I might not be the right person to ask about this, since I don’t have enough knowledge about HLSL and what the problems are exactly.
But we really need a better way of referencing 2D sheets through the custom node.
Right now there is a working way of doing Parallax Occlusion Mapping, it might not be perfect, and it doesn’t have self shadowing.
But it’s better than nothing. The only problem is that it’s so clunky and hacky to get it to reference the right heightmaps. Can we please get a better way of doing it?
Sure it works “ok” when you only need one, even though it’s still awful and horrible to work with, but it’s a mess once you need the effect more than once in a material.
The POM thread is by far the biggest one in the rendering section: POM material - Rendering - Unreal Engine Forums so there is definitely interest in this, and everyone is having the same problem.
There’s 4 pages but not a word form Epic regarding this problem. DanielW mentioned the PixelDepthOffset node being worked on, which would be great for POM, but not a word on the big problem a lot of us are facing.
I’d just like to know if this is something that can be expected to be solved, or if I should just scrap my huge landscape material and go without POM.
Please Epic, can we get some answer on this? POM is a bigger deal than it’s credited to be and a great solution that isn’t very costly, and definitely something a lot of us really need/want, and I’m sure this feature would open up to tons of other stuff that face a similar problem.
I support Sitrec, but I do think there is one more concern: the current POM shader is not an official one. POM is one of the best ways to add depth, as far as I experienced it, and not having an official shader for this is kinda sad. The current one is, like Sitrec said within the other thread, more or less hacky. It would be nice to get a proper shader for this which is natively integrated into the engine, I see no disadvantages at all.
For anyone not familiar with POM, here you have a small comparison of the three current ways, I know of, to add depth: http://i.imgur.com/6bBd0c0h.png
(Click for full res)
My apologies for not responding sooner here, but I have entered a feature request (UE-15975) to add a Parallax Calculation node into the Material Editor. It may ultimately be a version of Ehamloptiran’s Custom Code they posted in the POM Rendering thread. The quickest way to really get this feature implemented in the engine is to add a pull request for the implemented Source code for the material node. Our rendering engineers respond quite regularly to implementing pull requests into the engine. If they find an issue with coding standards or possible bugs related to the code they do work with users to help improve features to get them into the engine quickly.
The version from the link above is probably the better choice as it takes the POM material network in the other thread to the next level, and they are continuing to improve it, such as hopefully supporting the pixel depth node in 4.8 to allow for true shadow/decal placement.