Patent · US Expired

Method, system and computer program product for multi-pass bump-mapping into an environment map

US6384824B1 · kind B1 · utility

50Cited by
1References
17Claims
0Family size

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Key dates

Filing dateAug 20, 1999
Grant dateMay 7, 2002
Priority date
Expiry dateAug 20, 2019

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06T15/506
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

A method, system, and computer program product are provided for multi-pass bump-mapping into an environment map. At least two passes are made through a hardware rasterizer to bump map into an environment map. In the first pass, a lighting equation is overloaded. The overloaded lighting equation represents a reflection vector of a perturbed normal at a pixel position. The reflection vector at a pixel position is then generated according to the overloaded lighting equation. In a second pass, at least one texel in an environment map is accessed based on the generated reflection vector. For example, the generated reflection vector can be used as a look-up into the environment map to access one or more texel samples. In one example implementation, a lighting equation includes a specular material vector Sm, a lighting vector L, and an ambient material vector Am. Such a lighting equation is overloaded by setting the specular material vector Sm to equal a perturbed normal vector N′, setting the lighting vector L to equal a viewing vector V at the pixel position, and setting an ambient material vector Am to equal the viewing vector V. Other terms in the lighting equation include a spe…

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.