I wanted to learn a little bit more about bump mapping and how they’re used in the real world. Apparently, nowadays something called normal maps are much more popular than bump maps because they can store much more information. Bump maps can really only show height information (and are grayscale), while normal maps can show angle information as well. They’re a very similar concept.
I found it really cool that you can use normal maps to add small details to a model without destroying performance. You can take a high poly count model, create a lower poly model from it, and then “bake” the details onto it. This would create a normal map that preserves the details of the higher poly map, yet at a lower performance cost.
I mostly consider normal and bump mapping to be the same thing: fake the normals as if it were another surface. The description from class would technically be normal mapping because I described it as arbitrary perturbations to the normals. Bump mapping would be the special case where the perturbations are based on gradients of a height field.
You're right, it's very useful.
Staffjamesfobrien
I mostly consider normal and bump mapping to be the same thing: fake the normals as if it were another surface. The description from class would technically be normal mapping because I described it as arbitrary perturbations to the normals. Bump mapping would be the special case where the perturbations are based on gradients of a height field.
I wanted to learn a little bit more about bump mapping and how they’re used in the real world. Apparently, nowadays something called normal maps are much more popular than bump maps because they can store much more information. Bump maps can really only show height information (and are grayscale), while normal maps can show angle information as well. They’re a very similar concept.
I found it really cool that you can use normal maps to add small details to a model without destroying performance. You can take a high poly count model, create a lower poly model from it, and then “bake” the details onto it. This would create a normal map that preserves the details of the higher poly map, yet at a lower performance cost.
Source: https://www.cgdirector.com/normal-vs-displacement-vs-bump-maps/
I mostly consider normal and bump mapping to be the same thing: fake the normals as if it were another surface. The description from class would technically be normal mapping because I described it as arbitrary perturbations to the normals. Bump mapping would be the special case where the perturbations are based on gradients of a height field.
You're right, it's very useful.
I mostly consider normal and bump mapping to be the same thing: fake the normals as if it were another surface. The description from class would technically be normal mapping because I described it as arbitrary perturbations to the normals. Bump mapping would be the special case where the perturbations are based on gradients of a height field.
You're right, it's very useful.