Why is there nowhere to plug in a height map?

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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