Procedural Parallax Effect in Blender 

In order for the textures to look more accurate in Eevee, set the texture interpolation option in the image texture nodes to Cubic.

I just did a forty two minute tutorial on a program that hates me, didn't mess up, didn't get confused, bored or frustrated with the tutorial. Just flew by &... It worked. Cheers.

Always top-notch material from Chris.

So far best blender tutorial seen on youtube! you really nailed parallax effect and made it simple! CHEERS!

By far one of the best tutorials out there. Very educational. Thank you for this

Thanks for a comprehensive and in depth tutorial! I've followed it and gonna use it as a base for a cracked amber material for a concept art🧡

This trick of using dithering instead of sampling the texture lots of times just blew my mind. Simply amazing

Please do not be absent too much. Please do lessons like this

Very interesting demonstration, fair to say I learned a ton of new tricks. Thank you!

Really good job and nice explanations!

this is probably the definition of 3D magic. Thank you!

Amazing tutorial as always!

This is the only tutorial that shows how to fix the distortion when zooming in. Thank you

This earned my subscription! It was a phenomenal video.

Really awesome tutorial! Learned a ton!

Just found out this channel and I'm amazed by the quality content available here for free! Thanks for sharing all this knowledge with us!

Happy to see a new content in this channel after a very long time. Expecting more.

Awesome result, excellent explanation. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

This is such a great effect!

Very well-explained tutorial on achieving this effect! I will definitely be checking out your course because of the detail you go into explaining things!

Long time no see you my man, I am looking forward to seeing amazing tutorials and courses

This is honestly one of the best blender tutorials I've ever seen. Calm, precise and very clear, even though it's quite advanced shading. Keep it up!

very cool. I was trying to achieve this exact effect on ice texture while ago and ended up doing it with volume with cube, not plane(was look very good, but render times were going crazy)...I might try this technic, it is very fast to render and very handy to use it on plane. thx for great explanations, great tutorial.

Perfect tutorial!

absolutely marvelous,

Awesome tutorial like always. I got confuse just a little because I saw you change the logo, really cool logo man.

Amazing tutorial!

Amazing technique, thanks

After months of trial and error, I finally constructed a parralax occlusion mapping shader from scratch. And then this video comes out and makes half of my research redundant XD. The more videos like this the better. Parralax effects are extremely useful but have almost no documentation

Made a few changes, some of which might be useful to you. Especially the first three: 1) Instead of splitting out the z-component of the Incoming vector and divide by that, I used the dot product of the Incoming vector with the Normal vector. If the Normal vector points up (like it does for this plane) that's the same thing, but that should make it work for every direction. Not entirely sure this is correct but I'd at least think so. I'm not quite sure whether it's better to use this before or after applying the Normal map. Either seems to work. 2) Instead of the "Reflect" node, I used a "Refract" node with IoR of 1.309 (apparently the IoR of ice) which seems to have worked just fine. 3) I applied a more realistic absorption model: Instead of your modifying the color of all layers below by a constant amount, I took the white noise output to be the depth the albedo as base color. The absorption formula is really easy: - Take each channel of the color - use it as "Base" of a "Power" Math node - multiply the depth (so the white noise output) by some freely chooseable constant (the density) - plug that into the "Exponent" slot - recombine the color That way, extremely shallow layers render as white, at a certain depth dependent on the density, things become the base color, and beyond that, things become ever more saturated and darker. To get the color to look right, I plugged it in as both the Diffuse and the Glossy color. The logic being that, on the top level, perfect white ought to indeed be the correct gloss color, and below, if reflections occur there, they gotta pass through the ice and tint accordingly. Doubling the noise to drive this seems to roughly give a close result to what you got with curves. These three ought to make things more realistic. My other changes probably not so much: 1) As the roughness and normal of the shader, I plugged in the remapped texture, rather than the original. Effectively that makes it so you get infinitely many layers each of which could distort the image accordingly. Probably not realistic 2) I approximated infinite depth by, instead of remapping the white noise with a curve, turning the uniform distribution into an *exponential* distribution. Just like your curve, this will mean more sampling density close to the surface and less below, where, presumably, less light hits. But it makes it so the whole thing is open-ended. The process is pretty easy: - Take the white noise output and subtract it from 1 (so 1-x) - take that and put it through a logarithm (I chose base 2 but ymmv, make it a base >1 though, so now you have log(1-x) ) - finally, multiply by -1 so you get -log(1-x) Stuff near 0 will remain small that way, whereas stuff near 1 will shoot away to infinity, effectively giving you arbitrary depth. Finally, I also made some miscellaneous changes (some of which got obsolete after I was done with the other stuff) 1) Your Curve node was a Color Curve. I replaced this by a Float Curve for slight performance gains (would not matter for just this one thing, but if you got lots of parallax stuff to compute, generating three channels only to get rid of them after is kind of a waste) 2) similarly, your Color Gradient only linearly uses a single value of black and white. It's completely equivalent to but less efficient than a Map Range node. (If you need a more complicated curve, use a Curve node. Ideally don't use a Color Gradient node unless you actually need to deal with multiple channels) 3) Mostly cosmetic, don't think it matters at all, but I also changed the Roughness output of your Texture Group node to be a single Value rather than a Color.

Hi Chris you are an amazing tutor, I am doing the Blender Encyclopedia training right now and will do your car training afterwards. I really hope you continue to do advanced Blender content, thanks!

Honestly, your tutorials are amazing. tough heavily informative, they are easy to comprehend. This makes your tutorials ever so enjoyable to watch, as well as, easy to learn what you are trying to communicate. The ease of understanding concepts through your explanation further makes you an amazing educator. I would love for you to explain the Map range node. It's something I struggle to comprehend personally in terms of its concept. Maybe others might benefit from this as well. It's a node that is hard to grasp how exactly it works, would love for you to cover this subject ✨✨ Regardless, Amazing tutorial on Parallax mapping. I have learned a lot; it has allowed me to overcome the problem of creating crystal internal micro-fractures found in rose quartz. Thx a lot

This is ... awesome! 😱 You literally brought the texture to life! This opens up new and unexplored horizons ... I knew Blender is a great program, but you guys are great! Thank you for sharing these great ideas and explaining them excellently! (I am not an English speaker, but the explanation was very clear and detailed!)

Incredible

What great tutorial

Pretty Awesome! ! Thanks

Great work.

I'm so glad this showed up in my recommended, thank you. I've been wondering how to do something like this for a while now. I once saw a video about how some games made windows that have rooms behind them and wanted to do it in blender. I'm assuming I could just plug a depth pass of a room render into that divide node and it will work. 👍

Great tutorial. I’m not a blender power user (too many other software I use, blender is just another tool in the toolbox), so contrary to some commenters, I appreciate you going through some of the more basic things. Made me pick up a few solid new tricks even if I never actually need a material like this 👍

I think I can apply this, to the semi-3D volumetric planet's clouds effect. :)

Thank you

Very cool indeed

CG Masters you are great no doub it

Great tutorial ❤ I'm just looking for other alternative application for this effect

It’s interesting how much this effect resembles a lenticular print.

Please make a tutorial on realistic eyeball with iris parallax effect in blender! This is used in the unreal engine, but there is a rather complicated system. Thans for video! 😇

Nice to see your video after a long time, and I heard somewhere, you were working on a full vehicle course including animation and rigging? Is that something youre working on?

A M A Z I N G ! !

Really complex

Cool 😘

It would be so cool if Blender supported a file source input for the image texture node. It would give so much more space for node group optimization...

Very Cool need to try on unreal engine

such a question is where and how can such procedural textures be used at all, only for rendering a scene in a blender to do?

Excellent! A few questions: 1) The reason you divide by the Z-value is basically because the plane itself has a constant z-direction, right? Essentially, its normal is pointing that way. If you rotate the plane it once again won't look right, right? - I'm guessing to fix that you gotta take the dot product of incoming and the normal vector or something like that and divide by that instead? 2) could you use an actual absorption effect for the darkening at various depths? Should be a fairly basic exponential falloff with depth based on the absorption color and density. 3) maybe use the roughness map to refine the blur depth too: cracks probably go deep, but the white spots are probably just surface features

wow 🗿👍

This is a great video! However it does only work for flat surfaces. Do you know a method for curved surfaces as well ( you then would need UV coordinates )?

This is by far the most practical use(and one of the only uses) I've seen for the Incoming vectors in the Geometry node. The only other use I've seen is to create a laser effect, which was cool but not nearly as practical. Do you guys know of any other good uses for incoming vectors?

Fortnite ice fortnite ice (this is so neat and educational thank you for this.)

I've never really understood the "Geometry" node in the shader editor. Like, why one would go for that versus the TC node. As I understand it, the Geometry node is using "World coordinates" and TC using "UV coordinates". If the object is moved, would the texture in Geometry position then adjust to a different output? Is this intended only for stationary objects that never move? I was looking for a video that really elucidates the differences, but try searching on "Geometry node" in google, or almost anything with Geometry in it => get a bunch of geonodes videos... Thanks for any thoughts.

This is good tutorial but i probably missed the part, how to rotate the plane without broke the parallax. I mean, in your video you use XY orientation, and if i need XZ orientation then material is totally broking. I tryed EVERYTHING! The last thing i imagined may to help me - change Z in separate XYZ node to X and...no. Is it really that it may be used only for floor?

Hey there, I wanna challenge myself to recreate this material but without any image texture, full procedural !

would it be possible to do something more solid like a metal floor grate with this?

Great work! Sadly this only works on planes.. How would you do it on spheres - for example to simulate the parallax of clouds on a planet?

Can we bake this and use it in a game engine?? Like unity for example

Hello, thanks for this video is amazing, but i have one question. I have a shader that is made whit mapping and texture coordinate in almost every image texture vector input, becouse i animate the position vector so it appear to move. I am traying to mix this parallax effect in my shader but i cant do it. If you have the answer i will be greatfull. Have a nice day

Could you make an infinite mirror with this?

For some reason when I add the reflect node and connect the group node to it the bottom texture becomes super messed up even though it seems that I did everything correctly. Would anyone know why?

is it possible to make that prallax layered material effect in substance painter?

does anyone have something like this for eyes?

im trying to generalize the method for "W" offset (the "depth" effect, which is actually a 4D math thing technically) to non planar meshes. its fine on a Z aligned axis however other axis are distorted much like the distortion you showed in the video, only the same principle does not seem to work to fix it. was wondering if anyone had some pointers to help.

Can be achieved a lot easyer

why'd you stop making videos? they're so inspiring, I sorta miss em. probably very time consuming hm?

Good material. Thank you Chris. But! What about instead of creating fake parallax effect, create true parallax mapping using nodes. This will be much cooler and realistic for all the material which will use it.

My PC will run it? No This will be useful to me? No I'll watch? Obviously yes

😈 ρɾσɱσʂɱ

If this is an advanced tutorial, it's not necessary to tell people to enable Node Wrangler and definitely should need to show people how to enable it. I get so tired of people telling people to enable Node Wrangler and then showing how to enable it. If anyone is this advanced in Blender, they already have it enabled. Stop it.

Can you now remake this, but with less explanation filler and just the substance.

Another tip, stop explaining every single detail, especially if this is supposed to be an advanced tutorial, for crying out loud you had to explain what PERSPECTIVE is? We're not in elementary school dude, we know what perspective is, most of us know what vectors are as well.

This was pretty tiring with so much talking but cool effect ! :O)