Inverse Displacement Mapping

Abstract

Inverse displacement mapping is a variant of displacement mapping which does not actually perturb the geometry of the surface being mapped. It is thus a true texture mapping technique which can be applied during rendering without breaking viewing pipeline discipline. The method works by first projecting probing rays into texture space and solving for a ray‐texture intersection there. Shadows can also be determined by mapping a probe from the intersection point towards the light source into texture space and seeing if an intersection results. Our implementation uses as much knowledge about the base surface as possible to speed up the ray‐surface intersection calculation. We have limited our treatment to spheres, cones, cylinders and planes, and our rendering method to ray casting, in order to contain the scope of this work up to the present. The inverse displacement mapping technique can, however, be applied more widely, for example as part of a full ray‐tracer, and also as part of the rendering pipeline for a wider class of smooth surfaces.