This page is a shorter web version of an Eurographics2000 article , by the same authors. Bumpmapping has a similar purpose. This time, the shape detail itself is enhanced. Each texel of the bumpmap contains some information about the physical shape of the object in the corresponding point. The resulting model is dynamically shaded, very similar to the original, but rendered incomparably faster.
Blue arrows represent preprocessing stages, red ones rendering stages.
Orange squares are final preprocessed data, saved to disk at the end of preprocessing and loaded by the renderer. There are many ways to do this, and since it is a preprocessing stage it is worth doing it accurately. At this point, the normal map is quantized. Renormalize the result. This shortcut allow also to inherit some useful effect, as dithering.