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Displacement mapping is an alternative computer graphics technique in contrast to bump, normal, and parallax mapping, using a texture or height map to cause an effect where the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface are displaced, often along the local surface normal, according to the value the texture function evaluates to at each point on the surface. [1]
Parallax mapping with shadows. Parallax mapping (also called offset mapping or virtual displacement mapping) is an enhancement of the bump mapping or normal mapping techniques applied to textures in 3D rendering applications such as video games.
Most modern 3D computer modelling programs are capable of using data from heightmaps in the form of bump, normal, or displacement maps to quickly and precisely create complex terrain and other surfaces. In the earliest games using software rendering, the elements often represented heights of columns of voxels rendered with ray casting.
A texture map [5] [6] is an image applied (mapped) to the surface of a shape or polygon. [7] This may be a bitmap image or a procedural texture.They may be stored in common image file formats, referenced by 3D model formats or material definitions, and assembled into resource bundles.
A texture map (left). The corresponding normal map in tangent space (center). The normal map applied to a sphere in object space (right). Normal map reuse is made possible by encoding maps in tangent space. The tangent space is a vector space, which is tangent to the model's surface. The coordinate system varies smoothly (based on the ...
[citation needed] Relief mapping is highly comparable in both function and approach to another displacement texture mapping technique, Parallax occlusion mapping, considering that they both rely on ray tracing, though the two are not to be confused with each other, as parallax occlusion mapping uses reverse heightmap tracing.
Plasma fractal Animated plasma fractal with color cycling. The diamond-square algorithm is a method for generating heightmaps for computer graphics.It is a slightly better algorithm than the three-dimensional implementation of the midpoint displacement algorithm, which produces two-dimensional landscapes.
Parallax occlusion mapping (POM) is an enhancement of the parallax mapping technique. Parallax occlusion mapping is used to procedurally create 3D definition in textured surfaces, using a displacement map (similar to a topography map) instead of through the generation of new geometry. [1]