Parallax Occlusion Mapping

I can't get a straight answer about whether parallax occlusion mapping is better for cpu/gpu performance than tessellation?? At the moment I'm using POM (parallax occlusion mapping) to achieve height parallax, but it has it's issues. I'm honestly thinking of just using tessellation, which will depend on people having DX11. I don't know, I'll run some tests.

I checked up on Steam's stats and found that easily the majority of people on Steam are using DX12 on Windows 10 machines, and still quite a lot using DX11, so it could very well be that I'd be in the clear to just proceed with tessellation instead of POM. My head is starting to hurt again.

Substance Designer

Jumping into Substance to create materials from scratch, seriously starting from nothing and eventually ending up with some unbelievable materials. The program blows my mind, not just because of how powerful it is, but because the learning curve is pretty steep, my brain is on full melt down mode constantly.

I also want to add a little note here; that this project has literally brought me to tears a couple times, it's almost enough to break a man. I had read about that but didn't really take it to heart. My wife Elissa has been such a source of strength and comfort for me, I honestly don't see how God could have blessed me with a companion like her <3

Making Mountains out of B-Splines

Oh now things are getting fun, making terrain! I'm using World Machine to generate height maps and masks for various terrain regions, it's pretty freaking amazing. First you define various landscape characteristics as shown below:

Then you let the "machine" go to work after carefully tweaking a bunch of settings, and what you get is a beautiful masterpiece, what a fascinating program, there's just something about the ability to make your own little world: