This means that, although the result can be more realistic, it's also not as directly noticeable as something like the stone bricks, where you have very high areas of contrast. When the Parallax mapping is applied, a lot of these details are going to be occluded by pixels in front of the actual grass blade. So here, we can take a look at the image with no bump mapping, and you can clearly see individual grass blades, as well as some of the sticks and stones on the ground. In areas like the grass or groundcover, the effect can easily be lost in all of the details. As the effect of the Parallax mapping is going to be the strongest when you have areas of high contrast, such as with the bricks, or tiles, or other surfaces like that. If we take a look at our final renders again, there are some things to look out for here. Increasing the samples may increase render time, but it will generally give you a better-looking result. Depending on the complexity of the texture, you can also adjust the Parallax samples. So now the stone bricks are inset into the ground. We also have the option of decreasing this value, which will create the opposite effect. So in this case, by increasing the Parallax offset, we're going to get the overlap between the stone tiles. As long as that's applied, as soon as you start moving the slider for the Parallax offset, you're going to see the pixels inside of the image being shifted based on the grayscale values of the bump map. Now, for the Parallax offset to work, you have to have some sort of bump strength applied. But you'll also see a new Parallax offset, as well as Parallax samples. Now, if we go to the bump channel inside the attribute manager, or inside of the material editor, you're going to see the regular bump strength slider, as well as the texture slot. In this simplified scene, we can clearly see the bricks on the ground. So let's take a closer look at how the Parallax attribute works. So in this case, the Parallax effect is having a very dramatic effect on the end result, without all of the extra memory or time required for rendering displacement mapping. And if we go to an image where bump mapping is applied, we'll see that the effect of the bump mapping is fairly negligible.

If we take a look at the image rendered with no bump at all, we'll see that the stone bricks actually look quite flat. This is something that's being calculated 100% by the Parallax attribute inside of the bump channel. If we zoom in, it looks like each one of these bricks is overlapping the brick behind it. In this image we can take a look at the stone bricks on the ground. In this video we're going to take a look at the new Parallax attribute inside of the bump channel of Cinema 4D R18.

Parallax mapping performance