Welcome to the Relief Texture Mapping Web Site!   


Relief Texture Mapping is a technique that supports the representation of 3-D surface detail, producing self-occlusion, self-shadowing, view-motion parallax, and silhouettes. This technique produces correct views of 3-D surfaces and scenes by augmenting textures with per texel depth. The details are described in a series of documents, including papers, my Ph.D. dissertation, technical reports, demos with source code, and videos. Check them out and welcome to the Relief Texture Mapping World!


        Here you find:

            Copy of the SIGGRAPH 2000 paper
            Copies of the I3D 2005 and I3D 2006 papers
            Copy of the Technical Report  and videos for Rendering Relief Maps with silhouettes
            Copy of my dissertation (the most comprehensive source of information about Relief Texture Mapping)
               
Relief Mapping Demos (Cg and nVidia's FX Composer)
            Book Chapters related to Relief Mapping
            Video: Relief Mapping on DOOM 3
TM





Relief Mapping with Self-Shadowing

Relief Mapping with Self-Shadowing

     Relief Mapping with Chromatic Dispersion and Fresnel Effect

     Relief Mapping with Chromatic Dispersion
and Fresnel Effect


Relief Mapping with Chromatic Dispersion, Fresnel Effect, and Self-Shadowing

Relief Mapping with Chromatic Dispersion,
Fresnel Effect, and Self-Shadowing


Download the nVidia FX Composer Project I used to render the images above





                                              

Download the SIGGRAPH 2000 paper (see the ACM copyright notice)


Oliveira, Manuel M., Gary Bishop, David McAllister. Relief Texture Mapping. Proceedings of  SIGGRAPH 2000 (New Orleans, La),  July 23-28, 2000, pp.359-368.                                                                                                                                        
Paper (PDF, 0.8 MB) 





             

Download a copy of my dissertation

Oliveira, Manuel M. Relief Texture Mapping.Ph.D. Dissertation. UNC Computer Science Technichal Report TR00-009, University of North Carolina, March 3, 2000.
 
Abstract (html)
Dissertation (High Resolution Images - Adobe PDF, 4.9 MB) 
Dissertation (Low Resolution Images - Adobe PDF, 1.9 MB)









Multilayer teapot       

                           Cover I3D 2006 Proceedings







Fabio Policarpo
and Manuel M. Oliveira. Relief Mapping of Non-Height-Field Surface Details. ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, Redwood City, CA, March 14-17, 2006, pp. 55-62.

                    
Paper (Adobe PDF, 283 KB)

Download:  Vídeo     
                 FX Composer demo
                 Demo
                 3DS Max  plugin (version 1.7)










Relief Mapped Teapot

                                      Cover I3D Proceedings 2005



Download a copy of our I3D 2005 Paper on Relief Mapping
(see the ACM copyright notice)

Fabio Policarpo, Manuel M. Oliveira, João Comba. Real-Time Relief Mapping on Arbitrary Polygonal Surfaces. ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, Washington, DC,  April 3-6, 2005, pp. 155-162.

        Paper (Adobe PDF, 2.65 MB)


Rlief-Mapped Cube
  Download a Relief Mapping Demo

Requires nVidia GeForceFX
(preferable GeForce 6800
or better) and nVidia Cg 1.3 installed.                                                                                                     

3DS Max_plugin (version 1.8)






Relief Mapping - Silhouette rendering

             

Download a copy of our Technical Report describing how to render Relief Maps with Silhouttes. Most of this material was included in the recent book Advanced Game Development with Programmable Graphics Hardware, by Alan Watt and Fabio Policarpo (AK Peters, August 2005).

Manuel M. Oliveira, Fabio Policarpo. An Efficient Representation for Surface Details. UFRGS Technical Report RP-351, January 26, 2005.                                     

         Technical Report (Adobe PDF, 4.7MB)

         Demo
            Video 1: Column room  (3 MB, WMV)
            Video 2: Stone sphere with silhouettes (1.7 MB, WMV)

 


 Advanced Game Development Book

                      


Fabio Policarpo and Manuel M. Oliveira. Relaxed Cone Stepping for Relief Mapping. Chapter 18. In: Hubert Nguyen (ed.) GPU Gems 3. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2007, (ISBN 978-0321515261), pp. 409-428.



 Advanced Game Development Book

                                        

Fabio Policarpo and Manuel M. Oliveira. Advanced Mapping Techniques and Ray Tracing on the GPU. Chapter 5. In: Advanced Game Development with Programmable Graphics Hardware, by Alan Watt and Fabio Policarpo. ISBN 1-56881-240-X. A K Peters, Wellesley, Massachusetts, pp. 119-172, 2005.

The co-authorship of Chapter 5
(omitted in the first printing) is acknowledged in the publisher's web sitte for the book.
 


Relief Mapping Scene
Download a copy of the Relief Mapping Abstract in the ACM TOG (I3D Reprise at SIGGRAPH 2005)                                                                                                                                                                                                   

 
Fabio Policarpo, Manuel M. Oliveira, João Comba. Real-Time Relief Mapping on Arbitrary Polygonal Surfaces. ACM Transactions on Graphics. Volume 24, Number 3, pp. 935, July 2005.                                                                                                                                              

          Paper (Adobe PDF, 109 KB)                                                                                                  



Shader X4

Doom3 Video

   

Fabio Policarpo and Manuel M. Oliveira. Rendering Surface Details in Games with Relief Mapping Using a Minimally Invasive Approach.  In:Wolfgang Engel (ed.). SHADER X4:  Lighting & Rendering.  Charles River Media, Inc., Hingham, Massachusetts,  2006 (ISBN 1-58450-425-0), pp. 109-119.

DOOM 3TM  with Relief Mapping

Download the Video Showing Relief Mapping on DOOM 3TM 
            (Recorded in real time on a Pentium 4 PC with a GeForce 6800 GT with 256 MB)


DOOM 3TM  uses a normal mapping shader over all game geometry.  We processed all normal maps of the game to generate the appropriate depth maps, which are stored in the specular maps alpha channel (as normal maps are compressed and can not have alpha modified).

Download the modified shaders and the tool to convert the normal maps to depth maps.

The tool for  creating depth maps from normal maps is based on a Poisson Multigrid Solver written by Carlos E. Scheidegger and Gustavo S. Neto.

QUAKE 4TM  with Relief Mapping

Download the Video Showing Relief Mapping on QUAKE 4TM
 



nVidia's CineFX 4.0 Technichal Brief

Check nVidia's CineFX 4.0 Technichal Brief,  with a section about Relief Mapping.




Media Coverage
 
Raising Textures to New Heights: An innovative technique adds depth to conventional texture maps, by Diana Phillips Mahoney, Computer Graphics World, Volume 24, Number 7, July 2001, pages 15-16.



        Also visit  Fabio Policarpo's Relief Mapping Website




          Recent Related Work by Other Research Groups

 

 
Dynamic Parallax Occlusion Mapping with Approximate Soft Shadows  (I3D 2006)
by Natalya Tatarchuk
(ATI Research)

Applications

Rendering Geometry with Relief Textures (GI 2006)
by Lionel Baboud, Xavier Décoret (INRIA)

Realistic Water Volumes in Real-Time  (Eurographics Workshop on Natural Phenomena - 2006 )
Lionel Baboud, Xavier Décoret (INRIA)


Subsurface Texture Mapping (IRISA Internal Report No 1806, July 2006)
Guillaume Francois, Sumanta Pattanaik, Kadi Bouatouch, Gaspard Breton (IRISA INRIA)


Acceleration Techniques

Interval Mapping (Technical Report)
Eric Risser, Musawir Shah, Sumanta Pattanaik (
University of Central Florida)

Per-Pixel Displacement Mapping with Distance Function (GPU Gems 2 - Chapter 8)
William Donnelly (
University of Waterloo)

Cone Step Mapping
Jonathan Dummer


 
         


 

Copyright (c) 2000-2006 by Manuel M. Oliveira
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