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sitongc

Which one is better, normal mapping or displacement mapping? What difference between them when using them?

Zhuoqian

These are great ways of enriching 3D information, since meshes are not very good at describing bumpy surfaces.

keliu

Compared with displacement mapping, normal mapping is faster but cannot achieve the quality of displacement mapping. (I guess it is because displacement mapping changes the geometry and may generate more vertices and triangles, while normal mapping does not change the geometry at all.) Intuitively normal mapping should be used on distant objects while displacement mapping should be used on near objects.

I guess displacement mapping is usually used with some kind of tessellation shader in modern games. This enables the "blend" of displacement mapping and normal mapping from near to far.

Ref: [1] https://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/ch11s03.html [2] https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems2/part-i-geometric-complexity/chapter-7-adaptive-tessellation-subdivision-surfaces

Parker

Amazing the kinds of things you can do with mapping values to vertices. Super cool.