Here's an example of what I mean.
The far right-hand edge of this stone wall is a straight line, which means the 3D-looking stones are just some fancy texture on a flat plane.
The stones not facing directly at the camera have visible sides apparently projecting back into the wall. They look really 3D and are much more convincing than regular normal map textures. In addition (and it's hard to see in this picture) if the camera is looking at the wall very obliquely, the stones close to the camera partly block the projected sides of the stones further away from the camera - just like real 3D stones in a wall would.
Apart from the straight line edge, about the only other tell-tale sign that this is a texture effect is that the sides of each stone appear to be smeared from the front edges back into the gaps between the rocks.
So is that parallax modelling, tessellation or something else? Whatever it is, it's saving billions of mesh polygons and years of modelling time for the developers. Very impressive and for me, mysterious.
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Im talking about parallax, not tessellation.
Parallax takes a stack of 2d images, animated or not, and makes them look 3d, even though they are still just a flat stack of 2d slices. So the engine isnt rendering polygons.
If done right, the effect looks amazing and real, but saves an immense amount of system resources.
GTAV did this so masterfully with the mowed grasses and bushes in the residential areas, as well as other areas.
Heres a look at some simple longer grass using the effect, that could look great in FC:
Parallax Occlusion Mapping (as seen on the Far Cry 4 stone wall image) is separate, a short explanation to it's working mechanism would be using ray-tracing through a separate texture channel that works as a surface height map until you find the "best" (e.g. as close as possible with the given sample count) pixel that the ray intersects with, then sampling the albedo / reflectivity / smoothness / normal at coordinates at the intersection offset.Originally Posted by akilyoung Go to original post
It's a technique that is unsuitable for any complex geometry too, given the assumption the algorithm makes with the texture residing on a projected plane during tracing. Another shortcoming is the requirement for insane sample counts for grazing angles to prevent artifacts, rising exponentially as you get closer to a 90 degree angle between the view direction and the surface normal. I have mixed opinions on POM in general, some games use it sparingly and well, while some look like a horrible flickering mess because of it, and more often than not when a game heavily (ab)uses it, it is not a pleasant experience.
yo the detection system in ghost recon wild lands was absolutely amazing I would hope you would bring some of those aspects to far cry 5, like how you can be detected by an enemy or several enemies but if you take them out fast enough the whole dam camp isn't alerted, that was seriously amazing, and better stealth in general