Thursday, December 2, 2010

Deferred Iterative Parallax Mapping

hi
the title name is a "bomb" but its nothing too fancy...
just added parallax mapping using iterative scheme, this method uses few iterations of parallax mapping in order to get more accuracy.
for those who doesn't familiar with parallax mapping, here is a short description:
1. you need two texture maps: height, normal map
2. start from current texcoord used to sample your diffuse map (for example) and offset it by the height value (scaled and biased) of the current pixel in the direction you view direction (in texture/tangent space)
3. sample your diffuse map with the new texcoord.
iterative parallax mapping does just like that, but for X iteration, every iteration tries to move one step closer to more accurate solution.
don't get me wrong, you are not going to get better solution than a ray traced methods (depends on you viewing angle, at some angles you can't even tell the difference), but this method cost almost nothing, especially if you can save your height map values in normal map alpha channel.
also num iteration can be changed depending on surface properties and such.
here is screenshots thats shows it in action using deferred method:

without parallax

with parallax (4 iterations)

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