2008 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Modifying surface orientation
Published in: Writing mental ray® Shaders
Publisher: Springer Vienna
Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.
Select sections of text to find matching patents with Artificial Intelligence. powered by
Select sections of text to find additional relevant content using AI-assisted search. powered by
In the last chapter, we used displacement shaders to modify the surface geometry, with the normals adjusted by mental ray to account for the new orientation of the surface. In this chapter, we’ll look at a technique that doesn’t change the geometry of the surface as we did with displacement mapping, but only modifies the normal’s description of the surface’s orientation. Because we can use this technique to map a set of orientation changes to the surface, and these changes can create a bumpy look to the surface, this technique has traditionally been called
bump mapping
—we are creating a mapping from positions on the surface to a change of the apparent orientation at that point.