In fact, that Relaxed Cone Stepping for Relief Mapping is indeed great, I was trying to implement it, but I am failing miserably (the author of the paper told me to write my own bump-map shader first, and indeed he was right, I am failing to do that too...)
Just search on internet for "policarpo" and "relief mapping", you will end somewhere on his site (or his partner site) where LOTS of papers about relief mapping are avaible.
In fact, the idea is this:
Normal relief mapping (or as some people call, offset, or parallax mapping), needs to compare with some steps, I saw several implementations using a linear search with 8 steps, that altough is quite fast, it is ugly for big depths and still inefficient
The idea of the Relaxed Cone, is be faster than a linear search, and also more precise.
Also, the technique that Policarpo invented is a "curved" relief mapping (ie: it calculates the curvature of the object, and use this data to know if a ray entered and then left the object without colliding), the result is that the object looks like a object made using Displacement mapping, but no actual displacing is done, it only do not render the pixels that the ray do not cross (ie: do not cross the texture that was moved by the offset)
The results are really intersting, and I would really love that on my game, but I have no idea on how to even code a bump-map thing >.< (I think that I need to improve my math skills)
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