How cool is Polybumpmapping?
- Thread starter chaphack
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It's different in the way that the bump maps have been created. Traditionally for years, bump maps were created by an artist scanning or "painting" a height-map/graymap and converting it into a bump map. Basically, to give some random rough texture to the surface. Either it would be hand-aligned to the existing geometry, or worse, just thrown onto the model without regard (e.g. the orange-peel bump texture technique)
PolyBumps (or whatever you want to call them) are created from high resolution geometry. The normals in the normal map represent normals in the actual geometry being exported and decimated, not some artibrary "bumpy" normal texture that an artist hacked up in photoshop.
All 3D is done with vectors and oodles of dot products, so there is "nothing new under the sun" eh? But the devil is in the details of how you use it.
PolyBumps (or whatever you want to call them) are created from high resolution geometry. The normals in the normal map represent normals in the actual geometry being exported and decimated, not some artibrary "bumpy" normal texture that an artist hacked up in photoshop.
All 3D is done with vectors and oodles of dot products, so there is "nothing new under the sun" eh? But the devil is in the details of how you use it.
For buildings and such I do it old way by creating a heightmap and the results are very nice looking. I can see why you would want to use high res mesh to make the normals used on characters as getting the heightmaps to wrap around a bend and stay consistant is kinda hard to do in a paint program. So yes, I really like bumps and texturing is little bit more approachable using the various maps since the detail no longer needs a good artist's hand. Just some paintshop filters for diffuse map then an interesting pattern on heightmap and optional glossmap and we're done. Much easier then burning shadows and such into the diffuse map. Plus, you can have dynamic heightmaps with changing bumps like in that old matrix movie at the end when the guy jumps inside the agent and bumps run all over his body.
I didn't say it was new, just that the technique was never used in games before. Even today, I am not aware of any *shipping* game that uses it consistently. D3 is the first. Halo2 is using it also.
Remember, Carmack didn't invent BSP and it wasn't new when he used it, but was there any game engine that used BSP's before Doom?
Remember, Carmack didn't invent BSP and it wasn't new when he used it, but was there any game engine that used BSP's before Doom?
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