StrataSource
Bug: PBR Parallax Issues
Describe the bug
Parallax rendering is bugged in two ways, from what I can tell:
- Obvious stepping - at least within Hammer. Rendering appears to be several planes laid out one against another, and this causes visible seams from glancing angles that absolutely ruin the illusion. This also appears to affect MRAO rendering in unpleasant ways within Hammer, causing abnormally shiny edges on parallaxed surfaces that wouldn't otherwise exist.
- Parallax depth values below 0.01 completely break, causing Hammer to render the material as a solid color.
To Reproduce
Test both issues using your own materials and methods; this is not map-specific and it is not material-specific. It appears to be an issue with the shader parameters themselves, meaning the only way to debug this is going to be on your end.
Issue Map
Not map-specific.
Expected Behavior
- Material stepping should be minimally visible if visible at all, and shouldn't affect MRAO rendering (preferably). It should also scale to reflect the two relevant parameters in the shader, though this is more opinion/suggestion than bug, I'm sure.
- Parallax depth should decrease and become increasingly subtle.
Additional suggestions:
- Additional means to control parallax strength so things such as lower and upper bounds can be set, allowing abnormally strong parallax maps to be kept within sane levels for parity with more reasonable parallax maps, in instances where a lot of the detail is either in the upper or lower range this could be very useful - it may be worthwhile to treat this similarly to leveling functions such as the ones seen in software like Paint.NET.
- Perhaps some way to control parallax quality, like LOD?
Operating System
No response
Obvious stepping - at least within Hammer.
What about in game? I don't think we care about minor rendering issues in a level editor that renders everything in fullbright regardless.
Haven't tested in-game recently, but if memory serves right the issue is still somewhat visible in-game. (Tested this months ago so I don't necessarily consider my memory reliable on this one.)