Faster Relief Mapping using the Secant Method

Eric Risser and Musawir Shah

Sumanta Pattanaik
University of Central Florida

This paper appears in issue Volume 12, Number 3.
Purchase this issue from the akpeters.com web site.

Abstract

Relief mapping using the secant method offers an efficient method for adding per-pixel displacement based on height fields to an arbitrary polygonal mesh in real time. The technique utilizes an interval-based method in which bounds of the interval are computed in the beginning and are refined at every iteration until the intersection point is reached. The search space defined by the interval reduces and converges to the intersection point rapidly and outperforms the currently popular method based on binary search (relief mapping) used for performing this task. We compute the bounds using a simple ray-segment intersection method. We demonstrate the algorithm and show empirical and explicit evidence of the speed-up. Source code is available online.

Author Information

Eric Risser, 4330 Whispering Woods Place, Sarasota, FL 34233 erisser@cs.ucf.edu

Musawir Shah, 12986 Malloy Circle, Apt. 201, Orlando, FL 32828 mali@cs.ucf.edu

Sumanta Pattanaik, School of EECS, Orlando, FL 32816-2362 sumant@cs.ucf.edu

Source Code

BibTeX Entry

@article{RisserEtAl07,
  author = "Eric Risser and Musawir Shah and Sumanta Pattanaik",
  title = "Faster Relief Mapping using the Secant Method",
  journal = "journal of graphics tools",
  volume = "12",
  number = "3",
  pages = "17-24",
  year = "2007",
}