Call me crazy, but I think the end result of parallax mapping looks awfully similar to voxels. But from what I understand, it's computationally expensive and doesn't actually alter the silhouette of the object. While I realize voxel terrain engines died an unloved death after Novalogic abandoned them and are too memory-intensive to serve as an engine paradigm, has anyone ever thought of the possibility of using voxels as an effect to be used as a texture effect in conjunction with normal maps? If you've already got the code to handle voxels, it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to extract their heights out of the data already encoded in a normal map (or you could use your regular boring height maps), which would keep your data throughput from going nuts. And I've read that the blockiness we saw in Comanche and Delta Force games can be smoothed out using bilinear filtering and/or Marching Cubes.
So is this anything anyone's thought of looking at, or is it computationally even more expensive than parallax mapping? Or would it just be such a coding nightmare that it wouldn't even be worth doing, since we've already got parallax mapping down?
So is this anything anyone's thought of looking at, or is it computationally even more expensive than parallax mapping? Or would it just be such a coding nightmare that it wouldn't even be worth doing, since we've already got parallax mapping down?
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