Steep Parallax Mapping

[Macker]

Whilst displacement offers extremely high quality, it does have its drawbacks in the amount of time it takes to render, and the amount of RAM consumption. Obviously this is project dependant, but still...

Is steep parallax mapping something that could be implemented as an alternative to a bump map? I'm not entirely sure about the ins & outs of how it works exactly, but it appears to offer displacement-like effects in real-time in games.

http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/SteepParallax/

[Neilg]

There were a couple of plugins around way back in but they never really took off & the most recent is from 2012. From what i recall it wasn't anywhere near as quick as a bump map and i switched back to displacement in a few cases.

http://www.maxplugins.de/max2012.php...ef&sort=Author
https://mrblake.wordpress.com/2006/0...elief-mapping/

[Macker]

Those appear to be a different thing; relief mapping.

"Oliviera and Bishop's Relief Textures (1999) are a method for pre-distorting textures based on depth information. Although it has not caught on in the games community, the idea fostered the current work on parallax mapping and its improvements."

[im.thatoneguy]

I'm not as interested in the parallax functionality as the self shadowing that comes along with it. There was a shader for Brazil back in the day which would do self-shadowing of bump mapping. This is useful on bumpy surfaces where the light is glancing, you get not just the embossing effect from a bump map in the normals but the 'long' shadows which really are lacking in bump maps. I will sometimes use displacement just for that purpose. It can make a big difference in some situations.