Patent ID: 6980218

Claim:
A method of performing embossed-style bump mapping within a pipelined graphics system using conventional RGB textures comprising: providing object space Tangent and Binormal vector data for each of plural vertices of a polygon; transforming Tangent and Binormal vectors to eye-space; computing an eye-space light direction vector and a normalized light direction vector; using dedicated hardware circuitry within the graphics pipeline to compute texture coordinate displacements for each of said vertices as a function of said light direction vector and said normalized light direction vector and said Tangent and Binormal vector data; retrieving texture values from a texture memory corresponding to said vertices and to said computed texture coordinate displacements; and texture mapping said polygon based on said texture values to provide an embossing effect; wherein an embossed texture effect is developed from conventional RGB texture data stored in a texture memory minus an offset texture defined by the computed texture coordinate displacement values.