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kallico

Couldn’t you just just do the geometry for the triangles with normals perpendicular the view screen to save computation time?

dtorresr

It's surprising how good of a job normal mapping can do when "faking" how bumpy a surface is. For some games, you really can't tell how simplified a surface is until you get superrr close.

keenan

@kallico Nice idea, yes, you could try to use displacement mapping only near the silhouette, and bump mapping everywhere else. There are however some significant challenges, like:

  • to really benefit from this you'd have to adaptively tessellate the surface, which also takes work,
  • you'd have to be careful not to introduce ugly "seams" where the displaced and bump mapped regions meet, and
  • you'd still miss some important effects in the bump mapped region, like parallax and occlusion