PBR multilayer parallax windows

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Faultierfan

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Vanilla Skyrim uses multilayer parallax on some of the outside windows of the ship Katariah (dark brotherhood quest), but nowhere else. Vanilla needs the glow shader type to support glow maps - otherwise it can only do full mesh glow.
With CS's PBR, you can use glow maps together with multilayer parallax, and the glow comes from the lower layer.

Have an info dump:

PBR MLP has the full material on the lower layer, then puts a coat on top. You use a greyscale parallax map for the interlayer displacement. White parts in that texture are on the surface level, and anything darker displaces backwards. The coat only has limited features and is always semi-transparent, so for any metallic or wooden parts of windows, you need to zero the coat strength and bring the lower layer to the surface level.
That means that any fine metal bars that go through the windows have walls that go through the entire depth of the window. Because of that, you probably want to stick to larger uninterrupted glass surfaces. You can still represent fine metal bars and stuff via separate meshes.
PBR MLP also has refraction based on the coat specular strength (internally translated to IOR), but that's not enough to make the lower layer look properly vague when dealing with windows. You can't fake an entire room or an outside world with this after all, so I made my coat normal maps very wobbly, so that the lower layer behind it gets distorted as much as possible. And you wouldn't expect to see a lot of details through super wobbly glass, so the illusion works.

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  1. Neutrall9
    Neutrall9
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    Wow, looks insane!