Castle Wall at Night

# 1 12-12-2005 , 10:18 AM

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Hi,
I made this wall whilst playing with bump mapping. I'm quite pleased with it, but I'd like to give the bricks a bit more depth. I've tried increasing the bump map depth but I have reached the limit before it begins to look bad. Any other ways of making the bricks extrude in more detail?

How do they do it in games like the screenshot here:
https://www.gamespress.com/showfile.a...07%5FRTC%2Ejpg

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# 2 14-12-2005 , 02:02 PM

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no comments?

even a "that looks absolutely rubbish!" would be better than silence!

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# 3 14-12-2005 , 02:22 PM

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looks ok i think if you add a spotlight to simulate the moon so we can see more of the scene, it would be better, i think its kinda too dark.

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# 4 14-12-2005 , 02:23 PM

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also dont make the image so large cant see it all without scrolling, Mike usually deletes the image if you do.

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# 5 14-12-2005 , 02:26 PM

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it is just a wall, there is not much to say.

"I THINK, THEREFORE I AM"
René Descartes

www.mvorster.co.uk

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# 6 14-12-2005 , 02:29 PM

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Location: Seattle, WA

Posts: 8,245

that link you posted asked me to register at the site, so not sure what game effect you're trying to emulate.

But the best way to achieve actual depth is to actually have that depth in your scene, ie. modeling the bricks or using a displacement map that will literally carve the bricks out of the mesh.

In games, obviously, this isn't applicable, due to polycount limitations. The newer, higher-end game engines these days use parallax displacement maps to "simulate" depth.

Such as here:

https://www.infiscape.com/pictures/parallax.jpg

Again, this is a game engine specific feature, and not something that can be accurately portrayed in Maya without a plugin (unless Maya 7 has it somewhere that I'm not aware of).

What that is actually doing is using a grayscale hieght map to actually nudge the individual pixels of the texture around to overlap or stretch them based on the camera view and thus giving the illusion of real-time depth.

-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

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# 7 14-12-2005 , 03:43 PM

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Thanks for the comments dae. You've really helped me to improve.

But seriously, much appreciated mtmckinley & magicsy. I've attached the image I was linking to.

The paralax displacement you described sounds a lot like bump mapping - what's the difference?

Also, is paralax displacement like a dx9 feature (for example) or is it a unique feature programmed into specific game engines?

Moon idea sounds great. I'll model some more detail and try displacement maps etc to see how it goes. Ideally though I want to use technology that will work in games too, but I have a fair bit to go before I can start doing parallax displacements in a game engine user added image

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# 8 14-12-2005 , 03:52 PM

The Maya Mountain
Join Date: Aug 2002

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the main difference between bump map and parallax displacement map is that the parallax will actually nudge pixels of a texture to occlude itself (or *overlap* itself) to create the illusion of depth.

If you have a texture of a brick wall, with all the grout between each brick and apply that texture to a plane with a bump map, you will never see a brick's SIMULATED extrusion actually cover the grout that should be behind it. Parallax displacement will, greatly improving the illusion of depth.

Here's a good comparison:
https://www.pcgamemods.com/core/6739/screenshots/b1.jpg
https://screenshots.filesnetwork.com/...s2/49663_1.jpg

I want to stress that it's the *illusion* of depth... the depth is never actually there.

Here's a big technical pdf file that explains it better than I have the vocabulary for:
https://www.infiscape.com/doc/parallax_mapping.pdf

-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

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Castle Wall at Night

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