POM Pixel Depth Offset on landscape/WS materials casting strange shadows

Development Rendering
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Hello all,
I’ve been using pixel depth offset on some pretty complex materials to give the illusion of tessellation without actually using tessellation, i am finding it to be an incredibly powerful tool however its having a few rendering issues which im not sure if i can fix or if it is a limitation of the engine itself.

it does not work correctly on landscapes, world space co-ordinates or landscape co-ordinate uvs when using say a tiling texture like below - the idea is that my rocks are a flat surface and im using pixel depth offset to push them up through the river and that seems to be working visually quite well - however, even after a bake about 5meters in front of the camera is constantly in shadow anywhere this material is put down

has anyone had this problem? is there a solution or is this inherently a bug/doing what it is meant to be doing?

see below:
#2 - lit correctly
#1 - in shadow, always follows you around at fixed distance

251978-capture.jpg
251978-capture.jpg1839×1012 306 KB

example of it working correctly on none landscape, none ws material

251979-image-33664.png

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  1. PDO works fine with any coordinates, provided that reference plane is set accordingly.
  2. PDO is expected to give incorrect dynamic shadows.
1 Like
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thanks for the feedback, i hear what you are saying but still having some issue… so out of curiosity then - does a stationary light (the sun) count as a dynamic shadow even once it has been baked?

something is still screaming at me that there is something in the tangents of how landscape works mixed with the world space texturing that is throwing something out of balance but again, could totally be wrong

4

I ran into this a long time ago. Kite demo’s river’s normals are wrong, if you flip the right component it will fix it.