I have been going through every tutorial possible and following them perfectly. Despite my best efforts and searching through every related post I could find, my parallax occlusion mapping just doesn’t behave like how I see it in videos and images. Adjusting the height seems to only shift the UVs. It never seems to extend off the plane it is on, as in push out or in. As I move around the scene, with the height at anything other than 0, I can see the other areas of the displacement map like I’m looking through a window. It is almost like I’m missing a plugin or something. If anyone has any thoughts please let me know. I tried POM for a while about a year ago as well and couldn’t come up with a solution.
The reference plane of your heightmap texture is grey which indicates it is probably around 0.5, the POM node defaults to a reference plane of 1. Although I have no idea what is in that edited POM node.
Realistically with POM decals you should probably keep the reference plane at 1, and have a heightmap that only pushes into the surface, because there’s basically no way to prevent clipping at steep angles from heights that “extrude” out of the surface.
Thanks for the quick reply!! I have tried setting the reference plane to different values and I get very similar result to my original (It still just seems to shift the UVs) I will try making a test height map tonight. All of the videos I watch, when people adjust the heightRatio, the material seems to extend in and out of the mesh, whereas mine just slides the UVs. Here are a few images of other peoples stuff to demonstrate (one is an image I took from the example project):
It still feels like mine is very broken. If I use mesh decals, I’m limited to keeping height at 0 since adjusting height “slides” the UVs and the decal is no longer visible. I’ll give a new height map a shot and try again tonight.
It will look like that when you are using the wrong reference plane, in order for the height to scale correctly, the reference plane must be the same as in your heightmap.
I cannot stress enough, using the correct reference plane is the single most important thing to do when using parallax decals. My heightmap texture has a reference plane of 1 (meaning the “main surface” level of the heightmap is a value of 1, solid white) and with that value, the parallax works correctly. But if I use the wrong reference plane, similar to you I get a “window” where I can see the heightmap tiling.
I attached the height/normal map if you’d like to experiment yourself
Thanks again for your help! You were very correct. I redid my height map so the tallest point is white and set the ref plane to 1. For some reason I thought I had seen people have their height maps protrude from the mesh rather push into it, but I must be mistaken (Or that might just not work well for decals). Very happy with the results though and thanks for helping me to understand.
Well, I indeed realized it works on another friend unreal engine 5.5.4. It’s strange, on mine every projects have POM not working, I guess mine must be corrupted.
