Posted September 19, 2022 by gregosefo
Continuing the trend of rendering updates, I added bump mapping for the main character. Bump mapping adds extra visual detail to a drawn mesh without introducing new geometry. This is done by replacing the mesh's surface normals in the lighting equation with a different surface normal to give the appearance of bumps/discontinuities. In this case, the replacement surface normals come from a texture called a normal map (provided with the original Mixamo fbx) -- this approach is called normal mapping. The above image on the left shows the resulting ridges on the cap that come from the normal map (shown on the right).