Brick texture not 'popping' out?

I’m new to unreal :slight_smile:

It won’t let me upload an image of my texture on my object and the material editor within unreal, Basically I have a normal map plugged in but still only getting the smallest parts of the brick sticking out, (can’t see it unless you get really close). Does it have something to do with world displacement option? because that is grayed out for me.

Any help please?

First of all Welcome to the forums ! :smiley:

Now for your brick problem…

Basically Normal maps are here to fake of the light bounces on your material by changing the normals. This is good for small details on your objects, but wont make your bricks “pop out”.

Now you have two solutions to add volume to your brick material :

  • World displacement is used to move your meshe vertices around. You have to change the value of the D3D11Tesselation drop down in your material settings to be able to use it. Displacement can be quite performance hungry, so be careful with that tesselation factor ! You can find follow the steps on the UE4 doc to test it out.

  • You can also use a method called Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM for short), which is a bit more complex to setup but has less (not 100% sure about that) impact on performance since it does not impact your mesh. More on that technique in the UE4 docs. Careful though, POM is only faking volume and looking at your surface in a parallel fashion will reveal the trick unless you implement silhouettes in your POM shader.

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Here’s an image to show the difference between none/normal/displacement/POM :

As you can see the difference between Normal mapping and displacement/POM is quite visible !

Thank you, I shall give it a go!