POM Shader That Achieves Nanite-Like Displacement At Lower Cost
Easy to use, with support for decals, materials, and Landscapes.
Tore Lervik, best known as the developer behind Mesh Blend, an Unreal Engine 5 plug-in that enables controllable mesh blending, has shipped a new tool called FPOM, developed to provide an alternative to Nanite displacement that looks good for a fraction of the cost.
FPOM works with Landscapes, Mesh Terrain, meshes, and decals. It's direction-aware, so it follows the UV direction even when the UVs are scaled, flipped, or rotated. This means it can work with texture variation and tri-planar mapping. It also follows the slopes of landscapes and meshes, so everything gets mapped correctly across uneven surfaces.
According to the developer, FPOM has the same limitations as regular POM since it's still essentially "fake 3D," but in a lot of cases, it can look surprisingly close to Nanite displacement.
Here are the performance numbers:
"My main inspiration was that Nanite displacement is so expensive, but also very hard to deal with since the magnitude is relative to the mesh's scale. And traditional POM doesn't look great. So I wanted to try to fill the gap between these two.
Crimson Desert uses a post-process technique, while this is more of a traditional POM material technique. But the idea of having more non-flat surfaces is always an inspiration. I'm a sucker for nice graphics.
I've benchmarked all from large scenes to close-up grazing angles. FPOM stays fairly constant in all scenarios. In my testing, the difference in the basepass alone is 0.2x the cost. Taking into account all the other stuff affected by Nanite displacement, the difference gets bigger."
You can purchase FPOM here.
Check out Tore Lervik's recent experiments with making Nanite displacement work consistently in world space:
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