Hi,
Is there any efficient way to give a bit of depth to a flat surface via material editor?
For example like this:
Tessellation, Bump Offset/Parallax Occlusion Mapping.
Choose one.
Not really what I want. None of those thickens a flat surface. Tessellation pushes the whole surface up/down. Bump offset and POM only make a 3D illusion to the surface, does not affect the edges of the mesh.
You can’t add vertices to a surface except for Tessellation.
Well adding verts is one thing, but I think there might be other ways to do it without adding verts to the geo too. Like pixel depth offset.
so wait you’re ruling out POM and BumpOffset because they only give the illusion of 3D. does this mean you want to create geometry out of thin air?
pixel depth offset will only push the existing geometry btw. it’s sort of like a per-pixel but much more limited version of world position offset
aside from using tessellation with a displacement that only pulls the geometry that’s really really close to the edges, I don’t see any other way. nor do I understand how it is you’d expect to accomplish it
Typically I would create fins like that using geometry shader, but that is a bit more than using material editor for that.