Pomegranate
POMegranate brings quick and easy Parallax Occlusion Mapping to your Blender materials.
P.O.M. or Parallax Occlusion Mapping is a shader technique which creates the illusion of depth and makes simple geometry with very few vertices look high-poly and displaced.
It adds depth to your materials without the need for the extra geometry associated with displacement.
POMegranate uses "layers" to achieve the displacement effect. The higher the number of layers, the smoother the displacement will appear but compile times for Eevee will increase. Every layer reads the Height texture once so you usually won't want to exceed 64 layers for Eevee, and about 34 for Cycles when not using a Bump map or 14 with Bump. In Eevee, 32 will produce excellent results while performance will stay high and compile times will remain acceptable.
The Bump effect is known to worsen the stepped layered effect associated with POM and, for this reason, I recommend using only Normal maps and avoiding Bump.
The POMegranate node is a Texture Coordinate node, similar to a UV Map node, and there are 3 types:
- UV - uses the active UV Map of the object.
- Box - similar to using Generated texture coordinates, also known as Triplanar Mapping.
- Object - uses the object's origin as the texture mapping origin. See the Blender docs.
POMegranate can produce a "sink" or "raise" effect where the displacement will appear to take place either below or above the level of the actual geometry.
Simply choose the number of "layers" you'd like to use, the effect you want to achieve, and the texture coordinates method you want and click the appropriate button. The manager will create a new POMegranate node in the shader editor which you can connect to your Image Texture nodes.
With the POMegranate node selected, the Manager will display a pull-down menu from which you can choose the height map you want POMegranate to use, and your POMegranate material is ready!
Your download includes several PBR sets created by myself and others generously provided by Polyhaven.com.
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