Timex, relief mapping is very cool but has a lot of problems. One such problem is that you cant put anything over that texture polywise or you will show thats its floating above the mesh. Perfect dark was using paralax mapping and it had the same problem. All the things on the walls over the base texture seemed to be floating in mid air because it wasnt in the base mesh texture. Another problem is texture streching with fast changes in height.
There's a really good demo of relief mapping included with the nVidia SDK, also Policarpo (the guy who did it) just released another paper at I3d this year that was pretty cool. Policarpo's method also does proper intersection which is really neat, so meshes actually do appear to be affected by the relief texture. Crazy stuff. The issue with his method is that since it's heavily raycheck dependent it does run in realtime, but running it alongside a game's overhead is a different matter altogether):
Should be easy to add collision. Just use the hightmap for the textures to offset a collision grid... you'll have to use an ass load more polygons for collision "boxes", but I think it should be totally doable with some smart coding.
Cheap, yes, DP has it. While Kedhrin was over this weekend, he showed me the relief mapping stuff he had going in it. It's being neat, but needs to be used sparingly on objects that can really take advantage of it due to expense.
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lets just hope the boys at nintendo and sega get to see it before they release their consoles
wow I had to watch that about 3 times!
lets just hope the boys at nintendo and sega get to see it before they release their consoles
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Sega? You mean Sony? As far as I know, SEGA has no plans on releasing a new console ... unless I'm missing something.