Displacement Maps
Complex surface geometry
- Displacement mapping
- Tessellate surface and offset vertices according to displacement map
- Displacement map looks like a texture map with each pixel holding displacement value
- Very compact representation of a lot of surface detail
- Next step beyond bump-mapping
- Bump-mapping gives the impression of surface geometry but its just an illusion
- The silhouette of the object is unchanged
- Displacement maps genuinely change the objects shape
- Non-trivial implementation
- Sampling and filtering the displacement map to create a surface with no gaps is tricky