Parallax shader

Question

I recently tried adding parallax occlusion mapping to my landscape renderer and it looks and works fine, but I've faced some problems.

Here are 2 images (one with only normal texture mapping, another with parallax occlusion mapping also).

I have some aliasing issues which I marked with the red circles (you might want to see the FULL image by it's link).

These are obviously the result of the ray approximation, which is a part of the parallax occlusion technique, but I'm pretty sure there are some ways to improve the visual effect.

Could someone point the ways of removing these (maybe some abstracts, papers, researches, anything)?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Take a look at GPU Gems 3, "Relaxed Cone Stepping for Relief Mapping" (Chapter 18, p. 409). It's also available online here (PDF link).

The main purpose of cone stepping is to reduce the artifacts you see, but that introduces other kinds of artifacts. Relaxed cone stepping solves both problems, well enough where you can pragmatically say there are no more artifacts.