Parallax Mapping

holygon · Nov 2009

Hi guys just wondering if anyone could share their knowledge or even some links with me about parallax mapping as I am researching this kind of thing for a personal project of mine and am having quiet a bit of trouble finding any relevant information on the topic.

Thank you for any input or even discussion on parallax mapping use in games

edit: I should probably add that I am using Maya 2009 so hypershade information is very relevant for me :P

[HP] · Nov 2009

Mmmm... It's a good question, I know how it works and how to use it, but don't know any useful links for you, i guess.

Anyways, there's not much to it dude. When baking your object, just bake a "heightmap" as well, you'll have something like this:

Most of the times, this black and white map just go into the alpha chanel of the normal map.
Depends on which shader / viewer / engine are you using also, but if you for instance use it on marmoset, you must turn parallax flag on and you can control the depth as well with a slider.

holygon · Nov 2009

Oh sweet, a straight and simple answer on parallax mapping, finally

Thank you very much.

I'm assuming I plug the normal map into outColour -> normalCamera and then the height map into the outAlpha -> ????

Or am I completely off? haha (I'm guessing I am :P)

((this is for the Maya Hypershader))

OBlastradiusO · Nov 2009

Can you bake out a height map in Modo or Xnormal?

vahl · Nov 2009

yeah there's a heightmap checkbox under the normal map checkbox in xnormal's baking option, and i'm pretty 100% positive you can bake that in modo aswell

OBlastradiusO · Nov 2009

Cool thanks! I was totally unaware that you get a parallax map from a height map.

HAL · Nov 2009

Regarding xnormal, I tried that recently. It turns out to be all flat grey though. Anybody got an idea why? I bake the highpoly to the lowpoly with a cage. Are floaters a problem?

holygon · Nov 2009

OBlastradiusO wrote: »

Can you bake out a height map in Modo or Xnormal?

I know you can in xNormal but not sure about Modo?

OBlastradiusO · Nov 2009

holygon wrote: »

I know you can in xNormal but not sure about Modo?

I just checked it out. The displacement map bake is the height map for Modo.

Eric Chadwick · Nov 2009

Some more info here.
http://wiki.polycount.net/Parallax_Map

Whargoul · Nov 2009

Just be careful of using floaters - they produce incorrect heights, as you can see on [hp]'s example. They will swim around the surface is used in a parallax map directly.

HAL · Nov 2009

yeah noticed that when I got it working... for some reason I had to uncheck nearly every error related stuff in the rendering settings though.

Parallax Mapping

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