Parallax shading and stuffs!

Adam L. Gray

So, I've managed to keep myself away from Cryengine all these years, but I thought it'd finally be time to give it a proper go. And with that being said I'm completely new to it.

I'm building a new scene at the moment and were hoping to pop it all in there, now experimenting with its tessellation and parallax effects, but ran into a couple of things which had me surprised. Tessellation surely didn't work with this mesh, and seems to be more well adapted for rougher/rounder/blobbier surfaces. So I went on with using parallax shading.



The mesh is quite simple, and I decided to shove it all into a single smoothing group, adding supporting edges instead of splitting it up, thinking with the extra texture vertices that would be added, it'd more or less come out even. Not that I'm too bothered though, I just like the results and not having a hard egde in there.

As you can see in the top of the following image though, the 'Parallax occlusion mapping with silhouette' didn't like this at all. Switching over to normal parallax occlusion mapping will solve this problem. However, that in turn leaves a border running along the open edges.



Then for the bottom part of the above image, regardless of which type is chosen, the 'border' will still be there to cast a sharp edged shadow upon the adjacent tile.

I suppose I could've solved these problems either by:

A: Remove the supporting edges, and weld the blocks together into a larger mesh, eliminating the open edges.

or

B: Switch to the regular 'Parallax occlusion mapping' and weld the blocks together into a larger mesh.

Though what I most of all would like to do, is to understand how the process works, and if there's possibly any other way around it, letting me both keep the pieces separate, and allowing me to keep my supporting edges, without the issues appearing... any ideas?

Also, I should mention. The curbstone shouldn't be affected by the parallax per say, as it has no depth information added in the height map.

TLDR;

derp! :poly142:

leleuxart

How does your heightmap look? Could you post that with the UVs? Also, have you played around with the height bias?

Adam L. Gray

Hey leleuxart, I have indeed played around with the height bias, I thought it might had been the problem myself at first. Depending on what depth rendering method I were using seemed to have different settings. The tesselation based around your medium gray value. But the parallax occlusion one here seems to have full bright white as its flat surface.

Here's the map with UV's overlaid:



Thanks.

Legend286

If you look closely at your heightmap you'll notice that the edge heights are completely different (the top edge of the curb is quite low, but the right edge is average) so when you're butting the two instances together the parallax heights are different, causing that seam you're seeing. This is the only conclusion I can come to, so maybe it's not the problem. But you could try setting the very edge of the heightmap on both the top and right edges to be the same so they match perfectly.