I am currently playing around with the POM node in a material for a floor mesh. Pretty awesome node, but I found a problem with the baked shadow map when using the depth offset…
The shadows are of course baked for the non-offsetted surface, thus I get ugly shadows at geometry intersecting with the ground between the pixel depth offsetted surface and where the actual geometry surface would be… this part is hidden by the actual floor geometry, yet the POM algorithm is pushing the pixels of the surface back and show this shadowed part of the geometry.
Is there anything that can be done so the shadow map baking is aware of the POM material during the bake? Any other corrective method to get rid of those artefacts? Or is it simple a byproduct of using a POM shader that cannot be circumvented, other than only using non-static light sources?
EDIT: I found the fix with deactivating shadows on the floor mesh… that fixes the incorrect shadowing on other meshes.
What it doesn’t fix is the shadows cast FROM other meshes being offset. Is there a way to fix that? Can the additonal shadow steps offset the shadows received, or is that technically impossible and I simply have to live with incorrectly placed shadows?