adrenalin said:
Is there a difference between Environment-mapped Bump Mapping and Environment Mapping?
Can perhaps anyone try to explain it to me?
Thanks
These are really old terms that aren't really interesting any longer. Environment mapping is basically a method of using the environment rendered from the perspective of an object in order to light the object. This can be useful, for example, for producing accurate reflections and refractions for nonregular, small objects (an example might be a glass fixture).
Bump mapping is a means of perturbing the surface of a triangle from flatness for the purpose of lighting only. It adds no real depth, it just lights the surface as if the depth was there (i.e. it looks bumpy until you look at the triangle edge-on).
Environment mapped bump mapping is a term for combining the two technologies, so that one can use surface detail information that is greater than that of simply the triangles that make up the object for telling the hardware how light reflects off the surface, or refracts through the surface. This is different from plain bump mapping, as it allows actual objects to be reflected off of the surface, instead of just lights.
Effectively, environment mapped bump mapping makes a reflective/refractive surface look like it has many more triangles than it actually has.
But, as I said, this is old technology now. Everything's moved to programmable effects, and one surface may roll a great number of different effects into one. Environment mapping is also on the down slide as the cost to implement it are very large, and it looks pretty poor for most surfaces (early on it was used for water quite often, and looked very bad....environment mapping only looks good for small, contained objects, which games rarely attempt to show).
