Overview

As I stated before, this project is about creating a relief mapping shader for the KTH simulation brick wall textures. A relief mapping shader is, basically, a shader that creates the illusion of depth in a texture. The relief mapping shader uses ray tracing with height maps to calculate how the depth illusion should be applied. The use of ray tracing together with binary search makes the result very appealing, in most cases a lot more accurate then when using some other depth illusion shader technique, such as parallax occlusion mapping or parallax diffuse mapping. This technique though, is quite dependent of the use of a modern machine. Ray tracing with binary search is not an easy task even for the modern computer, when posting the theoretical part about the relief mapping technique I'm going to describe some methods to make this process a lot quicker while still generating great results. Next post is going to be quite heavy theoretically, describing the algorithm itself and how it works compared to the parallax occlusion shader. Maybe I'll split it up into two parts, we'll see about that.

A pretty nice result of relief mapping: