Parallax & Bump Decals | 5-Minute Materials [UE5]

Hello! Today we're looking at Parallax Occlusion Mapping Decals, as well as BumpOffset Decals inside Unreal Engine. Many viewers have struggled to get POM decals working in their projects, so I figured I'd make this short video explaining what goes wrong and how to rectify it.
Parallax Decals are super handy for destruction effects and are widely used in the games we all play.
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Computer Specs:
Ryzen 3900x 12-core CPU
MSI Geforce RTX 2080 Super
64GB Corsair RAM
One of those fancy nvme m.2 SSD's
Programs of choice:
Unreal Engine - (Game Dev)
Blender - (Animation and Modelling)
OBS - (Video/screen capture)
Davinci Resolve - (Video editing)
Adobe Photoshop - (Graphics and Texturing)
ProTools 11 - (Compositions and mixing)
OldSchool Runescape - (The best game)
Filmed using:
Sony A7s2 body
Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens
Yonguo YN360 LED's for colour
Yongnuo YN760 chip LED w/ Godox softbox for key
My lovely cats names are Boycat, Girlcat and Ladycat :)

[@andrewsneacker1256]

You're a legend.

[@yoshedev5290]

YOU ARE MY HERO I have been trying to make a material for a triplanar parallax occlusion ruin tiles texture and the bit in the beginning about creating a custom vector swizzle for the canera vector is super helpful! I still dont have it working yet, but that is surely a huge piece of the puzzle worked out!

[@importon]

Very cool. Please do a video on nanite displacement for dynamic damage. That would be super-interesting!

[@elielsonanjos7440]

Man the amount of usefull information that you emit by the minute is incredible, the way you explain the reason behind your actions and decisions is very much welcome and neded, we don't see that from many other creators from the tutorials part of youtube. Thank you! I learned a lot from this video. PS: I'm really having trouble with shadows in the terrain, i've figured out how to use a little bit of the auto material mechanics. So there's that, any idea on what to focus my reasearch on, so I get to fix it?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey hey! Thanks so much :) BY shadow troubles, do you mean that ugly kinda square-looking shadows?

[@elielsonanjos7440]

@@PrismaticaDev yeah those one, the top of hills get ALL squared Up on the shadows, It doesnt work at all. If I use Path tracing the shadows ARE correct but they have Sharp edges like they are low poly. Attention: I was not following your tutorial, I have a generic "me" made material that tries to be an auto material.

[@The.Anime.Library]

Best serie of all time

[@florianschmoldt8659]

Thanks so much! I ran into the exact problem and couldn't solve it. No clue what epic was thinking and why this isn't the default pom shader

[@tutumannyAQUE]

You my friend are a life saver

[@ShoryYTP]

i legitimately thought you were gonna say "hello and welcome back to five nights at freddy's" THE BRAINROT IS REAL

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@ShoryYTP oh lord hahaha

[@VortexArtLab]

Amazing video! Thanks!

[@devjitpaul1191]

good quality education right here

[@Marvin-bm1de]

Nice Tutorial, but where can i find where you put up the "new material" material ?

[@tizianadestefano937]

This is great! I'm only having one problem with this (or any POM decal honestly) : if I scale the Decal actor on the X axis, the effect completely breaks. Any ideas for how to solve this? I tried to use "Object Scale" and multiply the Height Ratio to "Scale X", but it doesn't seem to do anything.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey hey! Do you mean the parallax effect looks super banded? There's another more reliable way to get Scale, give me 1 sec to double check

[@PrismaticaDev]

I believe if you get 1,0,0 and plug it in to a Local -> Worldspace node, then subtract it from the PivotPoint and get the Length of the result, it should be the "length" of the X scaling. I'll be able to test tomorrow

[@tizianadestefano4717]

@@PrismaticaDev oooh I didn't think of that! I'll try it on monday :D Thanks mate you're the best!

[@glitchered]

i haven't played with shaders in a while. for sure gotta check out the custom hlsl node and squeeze some more raymarching out of the engine. volumetric shading is bonkers. i have a perlin ice cave in a polygon in my lil test engine.

[@sleuthman864]

The Shadows bit just doesn't work for me, do you need some other settings or project settings to see that work?

[@BDubs1000]

Works great and rotation works if you rotate the decal, but if you rotate the UVs it breaks. Any thoughts on how to input UV rotation into this?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Oooh that's a spicy one. I'll have to check when I'm in engine next!

[@BDubs1000]

@@PrismaticaDev I actually found a way to make it work by adding a custom rotator off the view trace length and input UVs and then add a rotation input then also breaking out the floats and adding a custom rotator for the Light Trace. Oddly, I can only get it working when rotation is from 0,0 and not center. Not a big issue tbh, as UV tiling can adjust for that, but rotating from center seems to mess it up.

[@voldemortsplace762]

@@BDubs1000 Can you please provide or explain the setup ? Using Custom rotator off the view trace length and light trace (after breaking floats) gives really wrong results with UV rotations.

[@desuii8873]

bro i just legit put it into search bar

[@PrismaticaDev]

Perfect timing! Haha

[@BigbotR-J]

Is this in the plugin you sell

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@BigbotR-J this is just a simple how-to video on things that already exist in Unreal Engine :)

[@nicholass3430]

Hi, thanks so much for this tut, youve really saved POM decals. Im also looking for a way to correctly transfer only Height to a Receiver Mesh material (meaning the Receiver's Col, Rough, Normal textures get displaced by the POM Height) Ive tried using Dbuffer to transfer Decal's original and POM UVs, subtract them to get an Offset, then add it to Receiver UVs, plug that into the textures. The height POM kind of shows up, but its all wobbly weird and the texture seems stretched (compared to regular decal response) I hope you can find a way to solve this! Then we can easily add interesting shapes to a receiver mesh, rather then slap on a brand new material altogether

[@profzeta8598]

im just skimming through but does it also add the falloff distance for the camera? to only render things within camera vicinity

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@profzeta8598 all the culling and unloading is included in the default Decal/rendering implementation in Unreal :)

[@npoctobblpogok3730]

Hello, good content. I signed up right away! Is there a way to make the texture transparent, but so that shadows are shown on it 100%?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hmmmm good question. You could just plug the Shadows into the BaseColour of the decal and then OneMinus the shadows and put it into the Opacity. However you might just be able to use the Ambient Occlusion output of decals but I'm not 100% sure, I just woke up lmao

[@npoctobblpogok3730]

@@PrismaticaDev if you change the transparency, shadows of other objects will pass through the material

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@npoctobblpogok3730Are you talking about the Decals in this video? Or do you mean shadows in general. If the latter, check out my Shadow Pass Switch material video! :)

[@npoctobblpogok3730]

​@@PrismaticaDev yea, I saw the shadow switch, it makes the object invisible and the shadow visible. But that's not what I need. Anyway, it's hard to explain, but I have a background that needs to be visible, there is an object in front of it that casts a shadow towards that background, and only the shadow of the object needs to be visible through that background, nothing else. I would show it visually, but that would be your homework :D

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@npoctobblpogok3730 Ohhh so like, you want ONLY the shadows to show up on an object? Kind of like a living shadow sort of effect? Something like that is possible but only with a Scene Capture and Render Targets, not the lighting/shadow pass itself

[@JieDu-yj2vd]

Parallex or bump has better performance than polygon model?

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@JieDu-yj2vd In traditional rendering, yes. However Nanite tessellation could potentially be cheaper than POM if you’re using Nanite. Regardless, you’ll need to use parallax effects for decals :)

[@IronMouth484]

Great!! But it seems not work well in Decal render in niagara....

[@PrismaticaDev]

Ohhhh true - I'll need to have a look at which data niagara Decals can actually access. Might involve some doodling with setting the "decal colour" variable in Niagara as the Vectors

[@metaldonutgames]

Shadows don't seem to work for me on POM decals. Everything else works great. Did you need to do something special to get shadows working here? I'm using UE5.1.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Have you debugged by plugging the Shadows straight in to the BaseColour? Make sure the light vector is valid and also make sure that the "Use Shadows" input has a ticked static boolean going in to it

[@metaldonutgames]

@@PrismaticaDev Thanks. When plugging shadow directly into base color it was all white so I guess it wasn't working for me. I rebuilt the material function and good news is shadows are now working. Bad news is that they don't rotate so stay facing the same direction on the texture when rotating the decal. I'm thinking the problem here is me! lol

[@Gamebreakers15]

How could you do puddles along with this? Like, let's say you want a cracked street and it rains in the game it would appear to slowly fill with water as an example.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Yeah you definitely could - check out my HeightLerp video to figure out how to get the puddles to appear using Heightmap

[@Gamebreakers15]

@@PrismaticaDev Okay thanks! I'll check it out.

[@aksoyarda]

I saw soemthing similar in cs2 bullet decal but it wasn't the same shader tech lol

[@Bayle1in2]

:)

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@Bayle1in2 :)))))