Cone step mapping

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Ok, it’s a feature suggestion to blender.
As far as I know there are no official support for parallax mapping in blender (you can make one yourself and there is an example right here: Parallax shader with Silhouette Clipping for Blender 2.8 Eevee and Cycles )
but I hear there is a (edit:ok not new but new to me! ) technique called Cone step mapping that is far superior to parallax.
documented here I think:
https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch18.html
example of Cone step mapping:
https://vimeo.com/6561536

Could we have that in blender? I was going to suggest this in right click select but right now it gives me 503 error.

This will look very good in eevee.

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From a casual look at your links I gather that this technique is about 10 years old. What gives you the impression that it is new? Or is it an ahead-of-its-time thing and you’ve seen signs of it starting to appear in practical/production applications?

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I think a BGE guy made a shader that did something similar once.

The thing is, there’s no application I know of that can generate the required texture map (it neither uses a normal map nor a height map). Sourcing textures might be tricky.

4

@tomjk
ok it’s not new but it’s new to me (like ray tracing that was new to me 10 years ago but it was made around 40 years before I was born). And my main point is don’t you like to see it in blender?

@Ace_Dragon well they are using it so there must be a way to bake it. maybe it’s a vector map? but if it’s implanted you can bake it somehow.

5

Try this…

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