Hardware Supported Bump Mapping: A Step towards Ingber Quality Real-Time Rendering

Today's high-end Gouraud renderers produce nicely textured scenes by mapping two-dimensional images onto modeled objects in real· time. We present a renderer which textures surfaces in the normal sense of the word using bump textures to simulate wrinkled or dimpled color­ ful surfaces. Using a simplified bump mapping method we first suc­ ceeded in designing a real-time bump mapping renderer based on the high-quality Phong shading model. Applying several improvements to our former Phong shading hard­ ware we are able to walk through perspectively correct bump mapped scenes illuminated by colored lightsources. This paper describes the main building blocks of the overall architec­ ture, including reflectance cubes to support a local viewer, a Taylor­ series based division to calculate homogeneous coordinates and our hardware adapted bump mapping method.