What am I meant to do with my height map? Why does Unreal not support height maps?
There’s no heightmap node because there’s not just one thing the PBR process does with a height map.
You could use it to power:
- Pixel depth offset
- World position offset on tesselated meshes
- Displacement
- Parallax occlusion, either via the simple BumpMap node or the fancier ParallaxOcclusionMapping node
These choices are nonobvious and have tradeoffs, which are all good reasons for there to not be a simple heightmap node.
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There’s probably an infinite number of youtube tutorials where there is a displacement node, but that was ditched with the end of version 4, because displacement wasn’t compatible with Nanite.
There are now various methods for displacing meshes, all of which are suited to different uses, but no single method.
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Are there any good tutorials for doing any of those things? None of them are obvious.
Here’s one for parallax occlusion mapping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJP__JRjEY