Torquinox posted at 2:11PM Thu, 07 January 2021 - #4408416

Let's take a second and fill in some blanks on DecalMachine. The decals sometimes begin as geometry and the plugin bakes them into a texture for parallax mapping. It's a Blender thing. I found a couple of videos about that. It appears to be Blender only. I don't know how that would be exported with reasonable expectation of good results in another program. Do any of you?

It's not really a Blender thing, although I'm not entirely sure which technique Blender is using here. Parallax mapping, or relief mapping, is a virtual displacement technique that's been around for quite a while now. It was first introduced all the way back in 2001. There are several algorithms for doing it, but it's a very effective method of creating the illusion of displacement without any additional geometry or subdivisions. When combined with a good normal map, it can appear extremely convincing in real-time render engines with practically no additional GPU or CPU requirements, aside from loading the maps into memory. It's not as good as true displacement because profile/border edges remain flat, but it's still very impressive in most cases.

If you can bake out a parallax map from Blender, just as you would bake a displacement map or normal map, then it can be used in other programs that support relief mapping like this. This could be useful for moving your assets to other real-time game engines like Unity or Unreal engine, both of which do support this technology.

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