Pixel Depth Offset

Note: I posted this and one other feature, but was told to atomize them to individual posts. I hope you all understand why I'm posting this again.

This is a very useful feature of Unreal 4 that I think would do wonders for natural handmade environment creation in Blender. To demonstrate this feature, here’s Quixel’s Jack McKelvie creating a beautiful rendition of Halo’s Blood Gulch in Unreal Engine 4 using it:

Create Halo’s Blood Gulch in UE4

When two meshes intersect, adds dynamic material blending and normal smoothing for a natural transition. McKelvie uses it numerous times in the video, for grass and dirt intersecting the ground, the bunker intersecting the ground, the mountains intersecting the Halo ring, the cliffs intersecting each other, and more.

If this were implemented in Blender, it would make creating outdoor environments with natural weathering and accumulation simple, without obvious hard edges.

The best way to implement this feature is likely as a modifier; in a landscape + scene object scenario, you'd probably add the PDO modifier to the scene object with the landscape as the target. Wouldn't want a landscape mesh stacked with a hundred PDO modifiers. You could choose the upper limit of the material blending (it could potentially cover the entire object!), as well as the scale of the normal blending. Then, you might choose the blending algorithm to affect the appearance of the material border, for different styles; that would have its own factor to affect the intensity with which the transition is applied.

Behind the scenes, so that the Apply button would work, it'd be creating a secondary material for the object with both material node trees, and using the weathering algorithm to construct a mix factor map between the two materials' node trees. It'd also be constructing a modified normal map for the object along the same lines, grabbing the normals from the target object and applying the smoothing at the intersection zone.

My other suggested feature is Layered Material Painting , which would likely made implementing this feature much cleaner.

I think this is critical for Eevee’s lasting success. Real-time homemade CG films could well be the future of independent moviemaking. Environments need to be believable for this vision to be realized, which means fast hand-crafting from prototyping all the way to final render. If I can drop all sorts of rocks and dirt roads and trees down, and only need one modifier to instantly make them look like they belong in the terrain, that would save huge amounts of time, and thus money. It'd probably look great in Cycles, too.