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.

Installation Instructions

To install the addon:

1. In Blender, click on Edit, then Preferences.
2. Click on Addons, then Install.
3. Browse to your downloaded POMegranate Manager.zip file, select it, and click Install.
4. Enable the addon.
5. The POMegranate Manager will appear in the N+N tab of the Properties panel in the Shader Editor window.

To import the nodes:

1. In the Manager panel, click on Update POMegranate.
2. Browse to your downloaded .blend file, select it, and click Update POMegranate.

The next time you open Blender or start a new .blend file, the Manager will remember the location of your downloaded .blend file and display a button to Import the nodes directly without the need to browse to the file again.

Usage Instructions

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 Bump 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.

The POMegranate node is a Texture Coordinate node, similar to a UV Map node, and there are 3 types:

1. UV - uses the active UV Map of the object.
2. Box - similar to using Generated texture coordinates, also known as Triplanar Mapping. See the Blender docs.
3. 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 PBR texture sets generously provided by the wonderful folks at Polyhaven.com.