Personally, and i've said this LOADS of times before, i think that Detail Texturing would do a lot to improve PS2 graphics. Things would benefit a lot more from detail textures than bump mapping or other "checklist" features, in my opinion, and it doesn't seem like it would be particularly unfeasible or costly either, unlike BM.
BumpMapping on PS2
- Thread starter ShinHoshi
- Start date
I loved the the following from the summary section of that paper:mboeller said:
What date was that paper? (That was a rhetorical question. I know it was 2000) Palette textures were on their way out ages ago.
That's not really the case. Just look at Unisys and Gif or 3Dfx NV and multi-texturing. Anyway, I was just pointing out the earliest reference to the technique that I knew.marconelly! said:
What's Crytek got to do with normal mapping? Do you mean normal maps as in DOT3?
Go and read the game developer forums/mailing list and you'll see that it is actually quite popular.
marconelly!
Veteran
Well, GIF is not a programming technique, and multitexturing is supported in all ATI cards as well, not sure if it's done the same way as on nVidia cards, though?
AFAIK, they have patented the technique where the normal mapping is used to enhance the detail apperance of simplified polygonal object (they call it 'Polybump'). That exact technique, however, is being used in Doom 3, Riddick, or Halo 2 to name some examples, and none of their developers refers to it as 'Polybump' or ever mentions Crytek.
Really? Which games use it / will use it?
Maybe a pre-baked bump map, where vertex alpha is increased when lit with a local light? Just guessing.PC-Engine said:
Are you kidding? It looks a lot better than emboss. If the object is small or the light source infinite, there should be little difference to regular DOT3.Bohdy said:
CLUT palette manipulation could also be used for random glimmer effects, like snow, quartz grains in stone, and distant waves on water.
BTW. specular is AFAIK impossible with emboss.
Thing is, two-pass bump mapping could be even cheaper than detail texturing, because you wouldn’t have to set up new vu coordinates. Maybe only one mesh consisting of two identical models, but with different lighting normals, could be send. It depends on how big a chunk of geometry the GS can handle in one go.london-boy said:
Well, maybe it depends on how yu feel about and perceive it. Some would say that the CLUT formats are an old fashioned, inferior way of compressing bitmaps. Others could perceive CLUT as a pure none wasteful format, with some nice extra benefits.Simon F said:
I doubt that patent could stand a testing in a court. Changing the palette to do animation and effects is an old and widely used idea. For example some old Amiga and Atari games use palette cycling to do running water.Simon F said:
I’ve read somewhere that normal mapping is actually a rather old bump mapping technique, originally developed for offline rendering. The source didn’t say by whom, does anyone know?
Also what was the first commercial game to use it?
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~pxfl/papers/APS.pdfSqueak said:
marconelly!:
> AFAIK, they have patented the technique where the normal mapping is
> used to enhance the detail apperance of simplified polygonal object
> (they call it 'Polybump').
No, Polybump is a tool. Crytek started licensing the technology at a time when 3d applications didn't have built-in support for normal map generation. The early licensing fees were absolutely ridiculous but a few months after the introduction ATI released it's NormalMapper tool for free forcing Crytek to reduce its fees significantly. I doubt they have any licensees.
> AFAIK, they have patented the technique where the normal mapping is
> used to enhance the detail apperance of simplified polygonal object
> (they call it 'Polybump').
No, Polybump is a tool. Crytek started licensing the technology at a time when 3d applications didn't have built-in support for normal map generation. The early licensing fees were absolutely ridiculous but a few months after the introduction ATI released it's NormalMapper tool for free forcing Crytek to reduce its fees significantly. I doubt they have any licensees.
But they are (a) more expensive to implement in HW and (b) generally offer much lower quality/bit than other compression methods.Squeak said:
Of course, if you're really desperate for palette lookup you can use programmable shaders
On the contrary, I've had a few years experience with patents and I'd say it looks fine to me.
And others have done hideous mandelbrot colour cycling but that does not invalidate this patent. Did these games, anywhere, mention
- generating a table of representative surface normals
- quantising the objects's surface normal texture so that it referenced only normals in the table
- on each frame , computing the dot product of the lighting direction with the precomputed normals .... etc etc.
Well the DOT3 technique was published at SIGGRAPH a few years back and the examiners were quite happy that it was novel. Unless you can show actual documents, I'd stick with the SIGGRAPH panel's opinion.
marconelly!
Veteran
Although that patent does probably have only a little more chance in court than when British Telecom asked for royalies on the hyperlinks, that's really not important. Patents like that exist to be licensed, and I cannot imagine licensing fee for something like that being anything high. It's interesting that such method exists, though.
marconelly!:
As for why there could be multiple developments with effects similar to that of Polybump, the idea of mapping flat detail derived from a higher resolution mesh onto a simpler mesh and then giving it the appearance of perspective through lighting is general enough to lend itself to multiple different patent incarnations.
Regarding bump mapping, the lighting effect looks far better when the method uses dot product calculations. Though, they're intensive.
The method covered by the patent seems fairly novel and specific; those usually hold up fine.
As for why there could be multiple developments with effects similar to that of Polybump, the idea of mapping flat detail derived from a higher resolution mesh onto a simpler mesh and then giving it the appearance of perspective through lighting is general enough to lend itself to multiple different patent incarnations.
Regarding bump mapping, the lighting effect looks far better when the method uses dot product calculations. Though, they're intensive.
marconelly!
Veteran
I have very clearly explained what I have seen, and I think that it could fool just about anyone. Even then, it was not like I ever said I knew for sure. Anyways, read my later posts and some of the replies, it's a water under the bridge now, and your jab was unnecessary.
Interview snippet you quoted btw, wouldn't contradict with anything I've said. There were no pre-baked BMs in BGDA, and there are in Norrath. However, I was not talking about that at all.
No sorry, I meant the detail texture tiles in Halo. When you find the boundaries of them, they look like they more or less cover a screen, without single texels being evident, .
The N64 texture cache is 4Kb, so the maximum texture size in that must be 128x64. But you can do larger textures (if you are willing to sacrifice some fillrate) with trilinear, splatting or by simply ignoring the bilinear seam.
The N64 texture cache is 4Kb, so the maximum texture size in that must be 128x64. But you can do larger textures (if you are willing to sacrifice some fillrate) with trilinear, splatting or by simply ignoring the bilinear seam.
Deepak said:Pump Mapping, even Radeon X800 can't do that///
It's Reebok Pump Mapping©, actually, that explain why the Radeon X800 can't do it, but since an agrement have been conclude recently between Reebok and Ati, you can activate Pump Mapping via the control panel if, at the same time, you're wearing 92' Reebok Pump.
Back in the days, thoses snickers were "the thing" to possess.Oh my god i had pair one of those!!!!!
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