Nintendo patents in displacement mapping

[Teuthida]

http://nintendo-revolution.blogspot....st-secret.html

[GameMaster]

Audience: But Tethuida, what is displacement mapping?

Tethuida: Well boys and girls...

Displacement Mapping is an alternative technique in contrast to bump mapping, normal mapping, and parallax mapping where the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface are displaced along the surface normal according to the values stored into the texture.

For years displacement mapping was a peculiarity of high end rendering systems like renderman, while realtime Application Programming Interfaces, like OpenGL and DirectX, lacked this possibility. One of the reason of this absence is that the original implementation of the displacement mapping required an adaptive tessellation of the surface in order to obtain micropolygons whose size matched the size of a pixel on the screen.

With newest generation of graphics hardware displacement mapping can be interpreted as a kind of vertex-texture mapping, where the values of the texture map do not alter the pixel color, but change the position of the vertex instead. Unlike bump mapping and normal mapping, displacement mapping can in this way produce a genuine rough surface. It is currently only implemented in a few desktop graphics adapters, and it has to be used in conjunction with adaptive tessellation techniques (that increases number of rendered polygons according current viewing settings), to produce highly detailed meshes, and to give a more 3D feel and a greater sense of depth and detail to textures which displacement mapping is applied to.

[Dyne]

I'm a nerd for understanding exactly what that means.

And hey, good one for Nintendo.

So, this raises the question: Was Samus in the E3 preview actually displacement-mapped? It would be hard to see because of the grainy quality.

[Shadow Fox]

No, Samus was not displacement mapped.

What we'll see is highly complex character models composed of only a couple thousand polygons, compared to 5,000-30,000+ on 360 and PS3 with bump and normal mapping techniques.

Displacement mapping is the real deal that even parallax mapping can't come close to in detail, and is worth every resource it consumes compared to polygon rate.

And since Revolution has nearly 1/7th of the pixels it has to draw onscreen like the other two, it can throw effects like these at you all day without flinching.

It's obvious PS3 and 360 are better if Revolution supported HD (RAM size alone would mean more repeating textures), but only in 480p/16:9, they will look the same.

[The Duggler]

Is that article credible?

[Canyarion]

Sounds nice, but I have to see it before I believ it.

[KiD_a]

I think this news has made things a little more interesting. Now I have gone on record in various places (in blog for example - ) doubting the significance of this HD era guff. Perhaps it is because I live in the UK and HD enabled TV channels are pretty much unheard of. Uptake of HD televisions (certainly at the high end of the scale) will take a long time. In any case if displacement mapping is as good as it sounds, which seems likely, it certainly gives a lot of power to Nintendo's arm.