Traditional flat decals often break immersion in modern AAA games because they look like stickers pasted onto a surface. ImpactFX solves this by utilizing advanced Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM).
This technique calculates optical depth based on a height map and the player's camera angle, creating the illusion of actual geometric displacement. When a bullet hits a wall, it genuinely looks like the surface has been pierced, chipped, or dented, adding massive visual fidelity to your gunfights.
One of the biggest challenges with bullet holes is avoiding visual repetition without destroying texture memory. ImpactFX uses a highly optimized 2x2 Texture Atlas Pipeline.
Instead of loading four separate 1024x1024 textures into memory (which increases texture fetching and draw calls), every surface uses a single 2048x2048 texture containing 4 unique bullet holes.
To maximize visual quality while keeping the memory footprint minimal, the Parallax materials rely on heavily optimized channel-packed textures.
Typically, a bullet hole decal in ImpactFX consists of only two texture samples:
Normal Map (_N): Handles the localized surface angle and micro-details of the impact.
Packed Masks (_Masks): An RGBA texture where multiple grayscale maps are merged into a single asset.
💡 Optimization Note: By packing these textures, the Master Material reduces the number of texture samplers required, which is a critical optimization for GPU performance when dozens of decals are rendered simultaneously.