It would be really cool to see a height map option for material varients and surface appearences. What this will do is modify the topology of the mesh/part based on the imported heightmap. There will also be a subdivision option that goes from 1-16 for basic CSG parts. To keep this optimized, there would definately need to have a streaming option for this.
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This sounds like a super complicated thing that would have bad effects on performance. You can already use normal maps to get a 3D look and modify your mesh in a 3D modelling software if you REALLY need a height map.
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Normal maps arnt enough in some cases
And having multiple different meshes for almost every wall that needs it will get memory expensive really fast
if u want to modify the topology u would most likely need tessellation (which is not that light on the battery of mobile devices) so this will prob not be added
^ assuming u want this to be live and be able to modify that height map, cuz if u dont need to do it live then just apply ur height map on the object in smth like blender and call it a day
if u still need it to run live EditableMesh is ur closest friend but in the end ur gonna have tons of useless triangles being rendered when u might not need them
Its mostly for certain use cases that I think would work really well in some scenes, and yeah, i could have meshes for it but the issue with that is I will have multiple different meshes which will eat up your memory use
Why even have so many different walls? The average player won’t even notice it. If you really want to have some bumpy textures you can always use Editable Meshes.
unfortunately, real-time displacement isn’t very performant or even worth it for real-time rendering in video games except for meshes requiring a silhouette such as terrain.
the real industry-standard is simply utilizing already existing normal maps or using POM/SPOM which are slightly more costly than normal maps but don’t actually require any added geometry. that would be a much more useful feature.
rawblocks doesnt respond to my pom request even tho it has 95 likes
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The problem isnt POM itself, its rather that Roblox is running out of texture packing space for their TexturePack internally.
The more textures or PBR maps they add, the more memory pressure they add and the more space they use. Right now they already use:
- RGBA (Diffuse + Alpha)
- PBR (Metallic, Rough, Emissive): RGB (Alpha unused afaik, technically pom COULD be put in here as the alpha channel)
- Normal: R / B (green is actually unused, normal maps dont need the 3rd channel technically so it can be optimized and you can theoretically pack a extra texture here!)
so what is the solution for this problem?
ohhh, i thought games just used a dissplacement map for it. I didn’t know there was a game ready version