Efficient Displacement Mapping by Image Warping

Abstract

While displacement maps can provide a rich set of visual detail on otherwise simple surfaces, they have always been very expensive to render. Rendering has been done using ray-tracing and by introducing a great number of micro-polygons. We present a new image-based approach by showing that rendering displacement maps is sufficiently similar to image warping for parallel displacements and displacements originating form a single point. Our new warping algorithm is particularly well suited for this class of displacement maps. It allows efficient modeling of complicated shapes with few displacement mapped polygons and renders them at interactive rates.