Live action vs Animated

[crutch]

What is used for adding detail, ie bump, displacement, normal, in Live action or Animated. Games use normal mapping right? So what about the rest? I'm pretty sure I have seen this answered before but I'm unable to find it. If anyone has a link to a detailed reason why one method is preferred over another that would be great too. Thanks:)

[laxman]

You should be able to google that and get some detailed technical info, but:

Bump: fakes the displacement, just tells the renderer to make the light interact with the object as if there was a displacement. Renders very quickly but looks fake close up.

Displacement: actually displaces the geometry by subdividing it and then moving the verticies around to reflect the map. You can bake this into the object so you don't have to recalculate it everytime, but you won't be able to modify it easily afterwards. This is what is used for close up shots of objects because it can give very realistic results. This takes a very long time to render. Renderman however is known for being able to accuratly calculate displacement maps very quickly, but it still takes a long itme.

Normal maps: I don't know as much about these, what I do know is that they work on the same principal as bump mapping, and they can be rendered in real time within a game engin so thats why all games use them. I don't think many people use this unless their model needs to be in a game engine.


Bottom line: stick with bump or displacment depending on how far away the obect is from the camera.

[TwinsenDude]

Wow I guess I was wrong, I thought a normal map was the same thing as a bump map.

[Foremancr]

Normal mapping is sometimes referred to as "Dot3 bump mapping". While bump mapping perturbs the existing normal (the way the surface is facing) of a model, normal mapping replaces the normal entirely. Like bump mapping, it is used to add details to shading without using more polygons. But where a bump map is usually calculated based on a single-channel (interpreted as grayscale) image, the source for the normals in normal mapping is usually a multichannel image (that is, channels for "red", "green" and "blue" as opposed to just a single color) derived from a set of more detailed versions of the objects.

I didn't know the answer but I google for the information. I felt that they were the same.

Maya uses the Modify -- surface sampler: to take a highly refined model normal map to upgrade the low polygon model.