Curved Silhouette Parallax Occlusion Mapping (CSPOM)

Publisher

Frostzone

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Overview

Curved Silhouette Parallax Occlusion Mapping (CSPOM)

CSPOM is an advanced shader that creates the illusion of complex geometric detail on flat surfaces using heightmaps and ray marching, avoiding the heavy cost of actual mesh tessellation.

Building on traditional POM, CSPOM adds silhouette clipping for convincing cut-out edges and extends the technique to curved or spherical surfaces.

Supports:

• URP

• HDRP

Created and tested in Unity 6.

🚀 Additional Features

📏 Pixel Depth Offset (HDRP)

HDRP supports Pixel Depth Offset (PDO), allowing displaced pixels to write to the depth buffer for:

• Improved depth perception

• Better interaction with scene geometry

• Shadow casting

• Ambient Occlusion support

• Improved decal projection alignment

Note: URP does not support PDO.

⚡ Built From Scratch

A POM implementation written in HLSL and integrated into Shader Graph through reusable subgraphs to make it modular.

Useful both as a production-ready solution and as a reference for developers that are simply interested in advanced shader techniques.

🧩 Shader Graph Ready

Modular Shader Graph workflow with included:

• Core POM Subgraph

• Flat Silhouette Subgraph

• Curved Silhouette Subgraph

• Combined CSPOM Subgraph

• Example Lit Shader Graph

Use the included Lit shader immediately or add the CSPOM node to your own graphs.

🎯 View-Angle Step Optimization

Ray march steps are reduced when viewing surfaces head-on and increased only at grazing angles, minimizing unnecessary texture sampling.

📉 Distance-Based LOD

Automatically reduces cost at distance by lowering ray march steps and sampling lower mip levels.

📦 Included

• Full HLSL source code for a POM implementation

• Shader Graph subgraphs

• Example Lit shader

• Example materials and textures

• Documentation

• Demo scene

⚠️ Limitations

• CSPOM creates the illusion of geometry through shader trickery. The mesh is not actually modified. As a result, the original mesh edges may still become visible when viewed from angles where the true geometry is exposed, such as looking toward a sharp cube corner.

• Curved silhouettes require balancing clipping thresholds to minimize grazing-angle artifacts.

• Pixel Depth Offset disables early Z-culling.

• While significantly cheaper than dense geometry or tessellation, CSPOM is not free.