![]() This is nifty because it allows the grayscale image to act as a translator between the human game designer, who sees an image in black & white, and the rendering engine, which sees an image in terms of surface normals. The relationship between grayscale and surface normal is as such:Īnd any shade of gray between changes the angle of the normal vector. Since the normal vectors are how the rendering engine “sees” the surface, this is a way to trick it into rendering texture on an actually smooth surface. Most rendering engines do this by relating the shade of gray to the normal vector of the surface. And every shade of gray in between acts accordingly.White areas on the map indicate highlighted or “protruding out” locations on the surface.Black areas on the map indicate dark or “sunken in” locations on the surface.Essentially, the map uses this grayscale to tell the rendering engine which spots are light and which spots are dark. If you were to create a bump map or just look at one, you will see a black and white image. A Bump Map Uses A Set Grayscale to Manipulate Height To understand this more, let’s take a look at how each method goes about rendering texture. The perceived texture likely won’t interact with the environmental light in a believable way.įree Garmin Maps Download For All Your GPS Needs However, the bump map starts to falter when the textured object is viewed from different angles. So, the result in both cases is that a geometrically smooth shape appears to have a very detailed surface texture. A normal map relates artificial surface normals to the rest of the 3D space and mathematically dictates how the texture interacts with the rendered light source.A bump map tells the renderer which areas of a surface are brighter and which areas are darker, no matter the direction of the light source.This is also where the bump map can become limiting, depending on what level of detail you are trying to achieve. The map creates this illusion by distorting the way the rendered light interacts with a surface. This is beneficial for video games because it means the model’s mesh does not need to be so fine that it physically captures all the little details like a displacement map. The goal of both of these maps is to give a surface the illusion of texture on a surface that has no texture. Read on to learn more about both so you can add them to your bag of tricks. Knowing the differences between these two techniques can help determine which one is better suited for the application at hand. Both methods leave the geometry unchanged. This tricks the rendered light into creating highlights and shadows. These methods are useful to know if you’re creating video game characters or rendering 3D animations.īump maps impose a grayscale image, so dark spots appear deeper and provide contrast for lighter “bumps.” Normal maps use an RGB scale to derive 3D vector normals to the 3D surface. Bump mapping and normal mapping are two different methods of doing the same thing: creating the illusion of surface texture to a visual computer model.
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