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POM is used in many games I think the first game to use it in relative abundance was Crysis 3. Check out the places near the water, stone and rock areas, many of the terrain areas had it too.

Its pretty expensive I think a good optimized POM shader has around 600 to 700 instructions.

 

For a more modern game, FFXIV uses it extensively for ground textures in the Dx11 version, not sure about the Dx10 version (PS4 is using the Dx10 code path) in the expansion areas. It looks OK-ish until you get too close to the ground and look at it an oblique angle. At that point the illusion falls apart completely and it just looks like arse. One of the faults with the technique. But it looks decent when viewed at a distance and not at too acute an angle.

That's why that picture above is so intriguing, it's providing 3D detail via texture without the many shortcomings of POM.

[edit] Just checked, no POM in the Dx10 version of FFXIV. Even with all the flaws inherent in POM, it's still a marked and huge contrast.

Regards,
SB

 

It's simple heightmap raycaster shader.
http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Tatarchuk-ParallaxOcclusionMapping-Sketch-print.pdf

There are other slightly more advanced versions like Quad Tree Displacement Mapping. (Which has acurate ray/surface hit detection.)
http://drobot.org/pub/M_Drobot_Programming_Quadtree Displacement Mapping.pdf

Pretty sure all solutions thus far have problems with stretching textures and grazing angles etc., so the tech shown in that rock column may be something very interesting indeed.

 

Hi guys. It is an amazing technique, I think that it could be something related with distance fields and ray marching.

Bye.

 

Thanks guys, all this time I was confusing tessellation in games as POM. Quite a dramatic way to draw a 3D object without the super high polygon count.

Very interested to read more. Thanks for sharing.

 

Crysis 1 used it for many ground surfaces throughout the game?

 

This, is essentially POM, in 1992:



Although the algo was called Voxel Surfing, but despite the name, there was no actual 3D texture, just a height-map and an albedo.
An extreme exemple, hardly relevant, but cool nonetheless.

 

Any relation to Crytek's PADM?

 

Indeed, fun times.

Trick for voxel surfing was taking distance of last surface hit as origin of the next ray. (And rendering image in vertical columns. (well, due cache coherency left to right and rotate to screen.))
Made looking up and down properly impossible, but was fast.

Now a days the optimization trick is most likely done in tiles and/or re-projection to allow free camera.

 

PADM uses tessellation and displacement, so I'm thinking probably not as the author stated there is no geometry.

 

Yeah it did.

 

Their description for PADM says it's an alternative to tessellation?

 

I was under the impression they were used together, now I'm not so sure lol

 

I can't find it in the documentation, I'm guessing this is what PADM is

http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC2/Silhouette+POM

 

https://twitter.com/AlexanderBattag/status/662993106250432512

Guess not.

 

Looks like this. It has no texture stretch, but also no overhangs. Maybe the maps are baked into displaced UV space from high-poly sculpts, and texel density is optimal.

 

Yeah this line is really interesting, how exactly are they rendering beyond the bounds of the original mesh? I hope they release what they're doing at some point.

 

maybe something along the lines of vector displacement mapping but using pixels instead of polygons?

 

I think he is doing global unlimited detail sparse voxel octree ray traced distance field multi-texture tessellation just because those are catchy names uninformed people love to throw around in internet forums.

 

You've just preempted the next Nvidia tech demo.