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This topic has moved here: Subject: What exactly is "bumpmapping", and why is it so much better?
  • Subject: What exactly is "bumpmapping", and why is it so much better?
Subject: What exactly is "bumpmapping", and why is it so much better?
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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.

  • 04.16.2004 11:34 AM PDT
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Bump mapping is making something flat look like it has depth. The lighter you draw the higher it gets, the darker the lower. It's basically an illusion, but it looks great. Also, it's supposed to be not so hard on the processor.

But I'm not that technical myself, maybe someone else can explain a little more detailed.

[Edited on 4/16/2004 11:37:03 AM]

  • 04.16.2004 11:36 AM PDT

bah

Real life objects often have no color variation in them. What you see as darker is really shadow or roughness. Bumpmapping is used rather than rendering a bunch of tiny polygons. If you have a crack in the road, the inside of that crack is the same color as the top of the road (fresh road). Now with bumpmapping, instead of making the crack in the road, they just paste on a picture.

  • 04.16.2004 11:37 AM PDT

-S

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.

  • 04.16.2004 11:44 AM PDT

bah

That would be the true technical definition there. Bumpmapping looks good from medium to far distances, but up close you can see the flatness, especially if you're at an extremly acute angle.

  • 04.16.2004 11:47 AM PDT
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Thanks a lot Shishka, that's just about everything I needed to know concerning bump mapping!

  • 04.16.2004 11:50 AM PDT
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Even in Halo, the few bump-mapped textures still looked pretty good up close.

  • 04.16.2004 11:51 AM PDT

bah

By "up close" I mean 10X sniper zoom.

  • 04.16.2004 12:17 PM PDT
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Haha, yeah, I know what you're saying.

  • 04.16.2004 12:27 PM PDT
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Yeah the grass looks horrible at 10X

  • 04.16.2004 12:34 PM PDT
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Here's a question to think about though:

In the future, when the next-generation consoles are out and the technology is more advanced, do you think techniques like this would still be used? Given that they can actually use more polygons to create the - for example - Master Chief, would they still go for bump-mapping and use the other parts for other things?

I guess none of us really know, but it'd be a good question to any character developers within Bungie to ask if they'd, if they had a choice, prefer a bump-mapped model or an actual 'everything-you-see-is-authentic' one

  • 04.16.2004 12:36 PM PDT