following up on the "distance" thing i saw early in this thread, talking about how snow can benefit from a simple bump map starting at 2meters distance and needs displacement for detail in close ups:
Is it possible that Corona will ever have a "distance-map" to use inside material shaders? I'm having alot of problems with displacement in corona when we're looking for example at streets or pavements (flat surfaces, horizontal, like snow, pavements, streets; ...)
Displacement looks good in the foreground, when using for example 1pix-displacement. The displacement does not look good at all when looking at the same material, in medium distance for example. Simple reason being pixels are being squized into eachother, and when displacement is calculating in 1pixel-detail, this wont look good, it gives jittered edges and small points being displaced upward, instead of for example the joint of a tile.
I can upload an example later on if needed, but I think it's clear?
If I'd be able to use a "distance-map" within my material shaders, I could use a blend of 2 materials: one with displacement, and one without. This saves me memory for calculation hopefuly + no more crappy artifacts for distance-displacement. This distance-map could be a golden map here for a mask within a blend material.
Right now I'd have to augment my displacement settings to 0.5 pixels or more, which explodes my memory usage to +64Gb EASILY.
This is a very frustrating factor atm. I cant use displacement on pavements and flat horizontal surfaces. Trying to use normal maps and bump maps, but they look bad without displacement on the foreground.
Solution atm: Render crop of foreground with displacement + render full without displacement and photoshop the displacement over the non-displacement version in photoshop.