Finally, Parallax Occlusion Mapping!

[SFtheWolf]

@TAN_;268392

Great work mate. I am planning on buying this when it comes out. Any ETAs ?

I expect to go gold in the next week or two! After that it’s up to the Marketplace process.

@mariomguy;268614

Oh gosh, I know this was a while ago, but are you OK now?

Not particularly, thanks for asking though. I’m too disabled to hold down a desk job. I have constant severe head pain (waiting on a neurologist appointment) and when it gets bad just surviving the day feels like an accomplishment. I’m on painkillers strong enough that I sometimes don’t notice when I’m burning myself on the oven. I’m also struggling with complex PTSD and a possible heart condition among other things. If I ever disappear for a period please just assume it’s health and not that I’ve given up on anything I’m doing.

@mariomguy;268614

A self-shadowing blueprint light source sounds pretty awesome! Also, Daniel W. commented on that POM thread, saying a Pixel Depth Offset material node is coming in UE 4.8: this will allow you to push pixels back into the screen, making post-process Ambient Occlusion possible. If you can use it, this will be huge.

I will definitely add that as soon as it’s out! I don’t think it would even be difficult to include.

@mariomguy;268614

Sorry, I tried to find a better solution than a simple fresnel falloff, and I just couldn’t. I tried pixel depth, a combination of pixel depth and fresnel, and even just hard-coding the samples, but nothing improved performance better than fresnel by itself: more samples at oblique angles, less samples when viewed head-on. I think the reason for this is the majority of screenspace for a material like this will be viewed head on, and only a small portion of the screen will glance the edges. Also, the instruction count is much lower than if you wanted to combine another distance-based system to eliminate ridiculous sampling in the background. Even one extra instruction performed worse than simply allowing the samples to accumulate in the distance. You can still try your own solutions, though.

Sounds like you’re having the same difficulties I am. Might scrap this part.

@Crocopede;268890

Just a question regarding what my eyes are seeing.
Can we perhaps have a wireframe shot of one of the screens?

The screenshots are of the material editor default shapes. This is 100% pixel displacement using the mesh surface as a canvas. No vertices are being moved. If you wanted to get some really bizarre and unique effects you could move the vertices too!

@Sitrec;269451

Also do you have any plans on releasing it though some other distribution method? So we don’t have to wait three months for Epic to release it.

My only concern with direct purchases is the fact that I plan to provide updates and I don’t think I can manually keep track of customers as a sole proprietor without it sucking up a disproportionate amount of time (especially since direct contact with people stresses me out). I’ll see if there are any good solutions to this and update everyone here, because I don’t want to wait 3 months either!

I’m also going to be setting up a Patreon soon (I finally feel comfortable doing so after they kicked 8chan/ED off). The primary reward for backers will be early access to basically whatever I’m working on at the moment, whether it be new graphics tech or music draughts or sky]scraper alpha builds.

@mariomguy;269880

The POM shader in the other thread has silhouette clipping too, but it’s so basic it doesn’t work within itself, and doesn’t work when you tile the texture. I tried writing it so it does, but it only worked for me in one direction, and not within itself. This one seems to be capable of clipping within itself, so the pixels glancing the surface will be capable of rendering the object behind it instead of flattening out the POM calculation.

The way mine works is you can set arbitrary UV clipping borders. Using those, the material function outputs a 1 bit mask that you can then send to your opacity output, or process however you like. This lets you set the clipping points to something more complex than just constants in case you want a specific effect. It’s still not as perfect as true geometry (nothing will be) but it’s the most robust solution I’ve seen. It also avoids that “black fin” problem certain setups will get when wrapping UVs around a cylinder or what have you.

@Crocopede;269976

Also wondering how it would work on terrain when blending it with something that doesnt have this POM.
I read somewhere that 2 blending layers don’t work so well when POM is involved

The workaround for the custom node brokenness can cause issues with multiple POM materials in one graph but I’m using shared samplers which seems to sidestep that. I will update here when I do the terrain/blending tests. Of course, there will be always be additional considerations and some aesthetic tweaking required to get multiple POM/non-POM materials to look correct together, since you’re relying on an optical illusion.

Great questions all! Thanks for being so communicative.