In a recent tinkering session, I discovered that it’s possible to use a white noise texture paired with a greater than node to mix between two texture coordinates, effectively allowing you to display a texture twice with one node. The drawback is that there’s a grainy quality drop, but this also opens the door to a lot of interesting effects and possibilities.
Like a quick way to do fake parallax without duplicating a ton of image textures.
I’m not sure if it’s actually practical to use in real projects, but it may be useful in previews and such. I haven’t seen anyone else use this before, so I thought I would leave it here in case anyone had any ideas or additional thoughts.
… the UnrealEngine has a bigger team and makes by far more money… and it also is a real time game render engine (something completly different than EEVEE) where you “need” every trick and so will implement as fast as you could…
…so if someone can implement this with some shader nodes… also all the info is “old”…
and had… (another example) …then why should “the devs” give us something what’s already there… ??
I won’t say exactly about the humongous resources that UE has (on top of it that is privately open source).
But is more like of a sharp decision making. About for example what features go in? What are the most useful features? What features truly make a difference in terms of how you use the software? What actually are considered good features in the imagination of people, what what actually works out of the box?
The case of POM in Blender is somehow a story of struggle. Everybody knows about it, everybody knows how to create it from scratch. There are master developers as well who can implement it in one weekend from scratch. There are some experimental versions on Graphicall from time to time (someone implemented at some point). Perhaps there could be at some point various source code commits that might not passed…
eg: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/parallax-occlusion-mapping/15774
So my point is that, everybody needs to be on the same page. Users + Contributors + Project Maintainers in order for this to happen. Is some part of the chain breaks then simply features do not get in.
Hence my rant, is that UE just gets features in while Blender in various cases needs 10 years of research before doing so.
I hope that from now on this will change for the better.
So when everbody knows… then why not just do it… why should a small team spent their time on this…
…i just don’t understand this expecting everything but pay nothing attitude…
There are a lot of people who just demands sooo much just because it is free… and it is sooo bad… but they don’t use other software… and just spent their time by complaining…
So here someone discovers this effect and tries to use it… and some people give additional info about it… and some do…
As Eevee is currently undergoing a big rewrite, focus is on that rewrite first, rather than adding new features. It’s basically just one person (Clement) who works on Eevee. And there are plenty of other new features that should be added, even just porting existing Cycles features, like the Nishita sky texture or hair shaders, approximating a sun for HDRIs so they can cast shadows in Eevee, lack of anisotropy in Eevee feels like a shockingly big missing feature,
and otherwise, raytracing (e.g. RTAO, Raytraced shadows, RTGI, whatever else), colored shadows, LODs (though doable with GN now), improvements to culling, bevel shader, and probably more.
POM will be added, it is (was? that task might be a bit out of date) an extended target for Eevee-next https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/93220. But with just 1 person working on it, it’s going to take time to get there.
With all due respect, I wasn’t really intending to start a development discussion about what the developers could, should, and will do. Rather, I wanted to start an art discussion about the current available techniques and possibilities, and the practicality and uses of such methods. If you’d like to discuss development topics, feel free to start a new topic in #general-forums:blender-discussion.
