Relief Mapping


'Effective Implementations of Advanced Bump Mapping'

During this project I hope to try various implementations of Curved Relief Mapping, discover its maximum potential and evaluate its place in the future of computer games.

What is Curved Relief Mapping?

Curved Relief Mapping, Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Steep Parallax Mapping.  These are just a few of the various methods of the latest bump mapping shader technology.

While each method is slightly different and its a hot topic for debate as to who's method achieves the best results and performance, they all give a visually similar end result.

For those who have not heard of the mapping techniques listed above, they are evolutions in bump mapping, with the popular version at the moment being Normal Mapping.  This uses a texture applied to the model to manipulate the lighting which is applied to it.  This can make models appear much higher detail than they actually are.

Parallax Occlusion adds a ray tracer into the shader program and uses a depth/displacement map in addition to the normal map to give the illusion of depth from the point of view of the player.

Animated Relief Mapping

The latest test of my Project, creating an animated relief map.  Specifically creating a facial animation in a texture.  take a look.

 

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One the final parts of my project, implementing relief mapping onto an original character.  I've imaginatively named it "BoxHead".  The wire frame render shows that the faces are not modelled detail and are represented by the relief map alone which is applied to a simple quad of two triangles.

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A close up of the relief mapped section of the character.

And the Wireframe.



A recent test of a human face applied to a cube.  The cubes surfaces have no extra detail and are only two triangles.


The same animation and map only with an inverted depth map in the alpha channel.  It achieves some interesting results, this optical illusion whereby the face appears to always look at the viewer can be achieved in real life with a concave model of a face.


The video below shows a standard cube.  There is no extra geometry on the faces, each face consists of only two triangles, yet the relief mapping gives the unquestionable illusion of intricate detail inset into each face of the cube. It should also be noted that the stone cobble is also a simple plane consisting of only two triangles.


This video shows the same effect to a more extreme level, to demonstrate the extent to which it can be used.