How Bump Mapping Works

The Chef writes: "Tweak3D has a pretty good article explaining how bump mapping works with 3D accelerated video cards. They cover all the basics of bump mapping and the advantages and disadvantages of several methods. Now if someone asks me how per-pixel shading or environment mapped bump mapping works, I'll have an answer (but I'm not sure if that's a good thing)." With the introduction of the new graphics cards, this is some interesting reading.

Comments

An open question

[JosephMast]

for all the hard core gamers out there... does this sort of technology really help make better games?
On one hand I really am impressed with the impressive graphics that are apparent in the majority of today's games, and perhaps this will allow game designers to think less about the technology (even "bad" code can hit 60fps with a smoking graphics card) and work on the game...
On the other hand, I think that technology shouldn't be the focus of a good game (aka who cares if the orange is triple pass bump mapped at 140 fps if the game isn't fun to play) while games like diablo (640x480 resolution) still get dusted off and played.... any thoughts?

Hair, Fractals

[Perdo]

Is hair just sharp bumps? Is there a limit how sharply convex a "bump" can be? Are we moving toward fractal geometry? big brushes for big objects, smaller brushes to add definition to the large brushes, bumps on the smallest brushes. Could fractal algorithms be used to generate complex shapes/textures without the standard 3D modeling technique of brushes + new bump mapping?

Bump mapping the nVIDIA way

[Ella the Cat]

I was in a hurry and my machine fell over as I was about to post this interesting link from the nVIDIA site. Lots to learn about therein. Sorry if I posted twice, give me a break.

The paradox of hardware acceleration..

[mav[LAG]]

..is that it becomes more and more important to find and use good visible surface determination algorithms correctly in software. When you hear figures of 3 million polygons per second done by the latest GeeWhiz 2 GFX card, remember that has to be divided by 30 frames per second to get acceptable animation quality. SGI's InfiniteReality Engine pumps out 100 000 polys at 30 frames per second. Quite quick - until you realise that a complex model of an aircraft or a city may be comprised of tens of millions of polygons. Rejecting as many of those as possible as quickly as possible (normally because you can't see them from your viewpoint) is problem which many bright people have been hammering on for 30 years now.

I know many graphics coders who are depressed because all of their hard-won knowledge coding polygon fillers, environment map effects and realistic shading engines in software seem completely superceded by advances in hardware. They shouldn't be. There's still tons left to research and better algorithms to be found - even more so now that more powerful graphics cards are becoming cheaper.

There's zillions of good Web references on the subject - here is a place to start.

Books are better

[DrSkwid]

try readin :

"Computer Graphics : Principles and Practice"
Foley, van Dam, feiner, Hughes

Mine is second edition 1993

everything from lines to fractal hairs

inc. anti aliasing & filtering etc.

A must read for anyone more than slightly interested
.oO0Oo.

Heres the proper link

[ghoul]

here