Method and apparatus for environment-mapped bump-mapping in a graphics system
US6825851B1 · kind B1 · utility
Assignee
Inventor
Key dates
| Filing date | Nov 28, 2000 |
| Grant date | Nov 30, 2004 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Dec 2, 2021 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG09G2320/0252
- WIPO fieldAudio-visual technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A graphics system including a custom graphics and audio processor produces exciting 2D and 3D graphics and surround sound. The system includes a graphics and audio processor including a 3D graphics pipeline and an audio digital signal processor. Realistic looking surfaces on rendered images are generated by EMBM using an indirect-texture lookup to a “bump map” followed by an environment or light mapping. Apparatus and example methods for environment-mapped style of bump-mapping (EMBM) are provided that use a pre-completed bump-map texture accessed as an indirect texture along with pre-computed object surface normals (i.e., the Normal, Tangent and Binormal vectors) from each vertex of rendered polygons to effectively generate a new perturbed Normal vector per vertex. The perturbed new Normal vectors are then used to look up texels in an environment map which, for example, may be a spherical reflection map of the environment surrounding a rendered object or a texture map containing lighting or other data for creating more complex surface lighting effects. A specialized bump map texture data/coordinate processing “bump unit” is provided in the graphics pipeline…
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.