- Shishka
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- Exalted Mythic Member
I'm not too familiar with the tech side of things, so I was just wondering if anyone knew what bumpmapping actually is. I know that there can be more things in the game without taking up as much space, but I'm ust wonder HOW it works.
When you're playing a 3d video game, such as Halo, the video game engine is rendering what you see in realtime. This means every model, texture, and particle effect is being drawn over and over again as quickly as the engine can, so to the player, it appears as though everything is moving. Due to the limitations of technology, complex scenes can be very hard to draw and redraw. A good example of this is a character model. Every vertex and the polygons between them have to be drawn over and over. So, the more complex a model is, the harder it taxes your engine.
With the growth of gaming from a small hobby to mass media, the visual finish of games has grown as well. Now, game developers are trying to cram as much detail as they can into their games. However, the need for detail has surpassed the abilities of technology, and most model detail is the result of a good texture, rather than a high-poly model. However, a simple texture can leave your details looking flat and fake. Enter bump mapping.
Bump mapping (and its cousin, normal mapping), is part of a suite of special effects known as pixel shading. Bump mapping uses a special texture map (called the bump map) to tell the lights in the game that there are details on the surface of the mesh where there are not. So, for example, scratches in metal can actually catch shadows like real scratches would, rather than looking like paintings of scratches. A floor that's actually perfectly flat can have convincing grooves, and character models can have crazy minute details such as veins and scars.