Relief mapping

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section contains too much jargon and may need simplification or further explanation.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page, and/or remove or explain jargon terms used in the article. Editing help is available.
This article has been tagged since June 2007.

In cartography, relief mapping, or shaded relief, is a technique of displaying 3D terrain shape by simulating shadows formed by a single light source shining obliquely onto a 3D surface.

In computer graphics, relief mapping is an alternative texture mapping technique to parallax mapping that is much more accurate, and can support self-shadowing and normal mapping. It can be quite simply described as a short-distance raytrace done on a pixel shader; various techniques can be implemented to speed up the raytrace by taking variable step sizes.

Relief texture mapping supports the representation of 3D surface detail, producing self-occlusion, self-shadowing, view-motion parallax, and silhouettes. This technique produces correct views of 3D surfaces and scenes by augmenting textures with per texel depth.

It is not yet common in video games, as it is a rather slow technique due to the need for a large amount of per-pixel processing. Crysis has a similar feature, known as Parallax Occlusion Mapping.