[Bf-funboard] 3DS Max now supports bump mapping!

[Chris Burt]

The problem isn't that displacement is slow.. its that having the 
geometry necessary to give displaced faces a smooth and detailed 
appearance requires a huge amount of memory/CPU power. You can do very 
fast displacement on meshes that don't have a great deal of faces, it 
just doesn't look very good.

I agree with the sentiment that normal mapping, if added to blender, 
would be one of the greatest advancements in the render engine since 
subsurfs were added. The ability of normal maps to create *amazingly* 
detailed renders is unmatched by bump mapping which really comes up 
short in many situations. Should bump mapping be removed? Definitely 
not.. its an indispensable feature that has advantages over normal 
mapping. Mainly, creating normal maps is far more complex than creating 
a simple bump map. The reasoning behind this statement:

The real kill app for normal mapping is building a high poly mesh and 
then being able to extract all of the normal data for that mesh and put 
it in 2D RGB form, which can then be applied as a normal map to a very 
low poly version of the same mesh. i.e. Subsurf 6 mesh normal data 
extracted and applied to a Subsurf 0 mesh. Thus, when rendered, the two, 
with the exception of the profile of the mesh, appear to be almost 
identical, at least in terms of shading quality.

Trip - I'm not sure you're right when you say normal maps give the 
appearance that corners are shaded too... from what I can tell, normal 
mapping, just like bump mapping, has absolutely no affect on the 
appearance of geometry. It only affects texture and lighting. I could be 
wrong but judging from the links you posted, I'm pretty sure this is the 
case.

Alex - I'm very surprised 3ds Max 7 claims to be the first to do this...
perhaps they're using a very strict definition for the term "major 3d 
application." So far as I know Zbrush does this.

--Chris

trip wrote:
> You are missing something here.
> A displacement map is fast. Blenders displacement mapping is slow and 
> need a huge number of mesh to for at render time, we have that button to 
> give it more mesh but it really needs to get usefull fast as anything 
> over 6 eats it's lunch. A real use of blenders would be to use normal 
> maps for fine minute detail and displacement for the mesh displace.
> 
> Either way Blender needs normal maps , and a faster displacement mapper, 
> also it needs to be able to displace the mesh while mesh editing.