On Farming Simulator 22, parallax occlusion mapping will apply to all soils

Giants Software tells us more, via its blog, about how the parallax occlusion mapping will be used on FS 22. We took the lead and made a article and video to popularize this texturing technique a bit.

In Farming Simulator 22, the soils will appear more realistic, less flat, thanks to the use of the Parallax Occlusion Mapping implemented in the Giants Engine 9. Being a greedy graphic effect (but much less than a real 3D deformation calculation ), it can be disabled on the most modest PC configurations.

Unsurprisingly, it is the use of a grayscale height map that seems to be retained by the developers (black is hollowed out, white is zero level). You can see this in the example below, where the darker footprint will be marked in the ground.

If this technique can be applied on a small scale, it can also be applied to large environments. So a height map can be used to shape valleys or mountains. For the moment, Giants Software is still working on the implementation of Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM), but here is a little before/after preview on Farming Simulator 22 (left: without POM – right: with POM)