Crytek's PolyBump

[SlmDnk]

http://crytek.com/downloads/index.php?sx=polybump

I noticed that Crytek has released some PolyBump stuff. Very impressive detail, lighting and LOD (!!). IMHO, this also gives us a sneak peak (sort of) on Doom 3 tech and what it will be like.

 

[Matt]

This reminded me of a shot NVIDIA (forgot who exactly sent it) sent me about 2 years ago, of a Quake 2 character that they bump mapped to show me the effects of bumpmapping. I don't think this shot ever got released, but I think it's okay to show it now:

As compared to what we can have today:

 

[MDolenc]

This is what ID is doing for Doom 3. You build very high res model (200K+ triangles) and then scale it down to say 5k and use the remaining triangles to build the bump map...

 

[fresh]

Yes, there are a few papers on this by Hughes Hoppe from Microsoft Research (do a google search). It's the same technique as used by id software for Doom3. You basically replace geometry with bumpmaps. So you can have low poly models with nice lighting. Another advantage is that it's waaay faster to do stencil shadows on a low poly model. A lot of games use 2 different models - 1 for the rendering, 1 low-poly for the stencil shadow. This looks like shit for self shadowing characters though.