Real-time relief mapping on arbitrary polygonal surfaces

Abstract

This paper presents a technique for mapping relief textures onto arbitrary polygonal models in real time. In this approach, the mapping of the relief data is done in tangent space. As a result, it can be applied to polygonal representations of curved surfaces producing correct self-occlusions, interpenetrations, shadows and per-pixel lighting effects. The approach can be used to consistently add surface details to geometric models undergoing deformations, such as in the case of animated characters commonly found in games. The technique uses an inverse formulation (i.e., pixel driven) based on an efficient ray-height-field intersection algorithm implemented on the GPU. It supports extreme close-up views of the surfaces, mip mapping and anisotropic texture filtering. Also, contrary to high-dimensional representations of surface details, the low memory requirements of the proposed technique do not restrict its use to tiled textures.